Attitudes to language diversity: prescriptivism and descriptivism, standardisation, language attitudes and prejudice, and public debate about correctness and change.

What this topic is asking

AQA wants you to analyse attitudes towards language variation and change: the clash between prescriptivism and descriptivism, the social value placed on Standard English, and how language attitudes can shade into prejudice and public debate. The key examiner expectation is that you adopt a linguist's descriptivist stance, analysing attitudes as social phenomena rather than agreeing that some English is simply "wrong".

Prescriptivism and descriptivism

The distinction is the backbone of the whole topic. Prescriptive attitudes cluster around standardisation, the historical process (Johnson's 1755 dictionary, the spread of education and print) that fixed a single "standard" and made everything else look like deviation. The trouble is that the standard is a social and historical accident, not a linguistic gold standard: the rule against splitting an infinitive, for example, was imported from Latin grammar where infinitives are single words and cannot be split. Descriptivists, including most modern academic linguists, argue that variation and change are natural, that non-standard dialects have their own consistent grammar (double negation, for instance, is systematic in many varieties and used for emphasis), and that no dialect is inherently superior. John Honey, by contrast, defended the teaching of Standard English on social-mobility grounds, which gives you a useful third position to weigh: Standard English may carry no linguistic superiority but still carries real social power.

Attitudes, prejudice and public debate

Negative attitudes to accents and dialects can harden into prejudice, often called accentism, with regional or working-class varieties unfairly judged as less intelligent or less trustworthy. The evidence for this being social rather than linguistic is strong: in matched-guise experiments (Lambert) listeners rate the same speaker more or less favourably purely on the accent they put on, and accent-attitude surveys repeatedly place RP at the top and urban industrial accents near the bottom. Public debate, from newspaper columns to social media pile-ons about slang, "text speak" or new quotatives like "be like", repeatedly frames informal or new usage as a threat to standards. AQA expects you to analyse this debate from a linguistic, descriptivist viewpoint, showing that the complaints recur in every generation (the "golden age" fallacy) and reflect anxiety about social change as much as about language itself.

Try this

• Match each of Aitchison's three metaphors to a real complaint you have seen about modern English.
• Explain why the split-infinitive "rule" is a poor example of an English grammar rule.
• Write one sentence using matched-guise evidence to show accent judgements are social, not linguistic.