You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, And The Politics Of Identity, by Robert Lane Greene

This is a book whose subject is easy to get wrong. Indeed, as I began this book, I was deeply concerned that the author’s obvious sense of ridicule at those he titled grammar grouches was merely a political argument wrapped up in the guise of talking about language, which is easy enough to do. This is all the more serious of a concern when the author explicitly mentions identity politics–itself a pretty toxic field–in the subtitle of the book. That said, while I found myself in at least some disagreement with the author in terms of our position on language, the book was a lot more fair-minded than I originally thought and the author shows marked sympathy to anyone whose approach to language is based on an empirical basis, which is at least some sort of common ground that I feel makes it possible to read this book profitably even without sharing the author’s perspective. While not everyone will be pleased to see the politics, the author seeks to do justice to the fears and the concerns that people have about languages while dealing with them in an empirical manner and that is worthy of praise.

This book is a bit more than 250 pages long, and it begins with a foreword (by John McWhorter) and preface before its table of contents, which is a bit awkward. The book begins with a chapter on language and myth (1). This is followed by a discussion of the author’s highly negative view of grammar grouches, which appears political at first but is then revealed to be somewhat different (2). The author then discusses the way that linguists love languages in ways different from most people that makes them hard to understand sometimes (3). After this there is a discussion of how languages can express almost everything despite the differences that exist between languages in terms of their form and structure (4). This is followed by a chapter about language and nationalism, which the author tends to view in rather negative ways (5). There is an irony expressed in this book that those languages that succeed the best by being broadly understood do so as a result of simplification of distinctive elements of their grammar, which makes sense as a trade-off between precision and ease of learning for adult learners. This is followed by a criticism of legislating language rules (6), as well as a deep look at English and French in competition and what each of them has to offer in comparison to each other (7). The last chapter of the book seeks to provide better ways of looking at language like clouds, not boxes (8), while the book ends with acknowledgements, notes, and an index.

The praise I give to this book, it should be noted, does not mean that I do not see some flaws in it. The author could be a bit more adroit, especially in the beginning, in commenting on the nature of his opposition to those he views as grammar grouches. His opposition appears to be due on the one part to his holding rather strongly to descriptivism rather than prescriptivism, as well as a somewhat naive belief that grammar could not always be in decline, while we would expect, adopting a thermodynamic model, that an increase in entropy (that is, in confusion that tends to degrade the comprehensibility and precision of language) to always tend towards increasing, except when there were specific actions done to counter this, such as the reduction in entropy that results from turning a language into a written one that allows it to retain its ability to be understood for longer than the spoken word alone. It appears that since such entropic processes to degrade comprehension can always be in action, especially where distance or a lack of communication leads to isolation between people, that language can always be in decline because it always tends towards breaking up large unions of people joined together into smaller groups of people who can understand each other because they have spent the time sharing a common culture and common in-jokes and other such references, unless there are shared texts they read in common or shared education that forces them to learn enough to understand others. This relates in turn to the problem of government that is so heavy in this book and in language politics as a whole.