Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism in Depth

The debate between prescriptivism and descriptivism is the most fundamental language discourse and underpins virtually every other debate about language. Understanding the history, key figures, and arguments of this debate is essential for Paper 2 Section B of the AQA 7702 specification.

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The History of Prescriptivism

The idea that language should follow fixed rules laid down by authorities is not universal or timeless — it is a product of specific historical and social conditions. In English, prescriptivism emerged as a powerful force in the eighteenth century, driven by several factors:

The Rise of Print Culture

The invention of the printing press by William Caxton in 1476 created a need for standardisation. Printers needed to choose between competing dialect forms, and their choices helped establish conventions that gradually became norms. The printed word acquired an authority that manuscript culture had never possessed — if something appeared in print, it must be correct.

Anxiety About English

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many English writers and scholars looked enviously at French, which had been formally regulated by the Académie française (founded 1635). They felt that English was chaotic, unruly, and lacking in clear rules. Writers such as Jonathan Swift (in his Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue, 1712) called for an English Academy to fix the language permanently.

The Great Grammarians

The eighteenth century saw the publication of enormously influential grammar books that shaped prescriptivist thinking for centuries:

Grammarian	Key Work	Contribution
Robert Lowth	A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762)	Established many of the prescriptivist rules still cited today: do not end a sentence with a preposition, do not split an infinitive, do not use double negatives
Lindley Murray	English Grammar (1795)	The most widely used grammar book of the nineteenth century; reinforced and popularised Lowth's rules
Samuel Johnson	A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)	The first major English dictionary; Johnson initially hoped to fix the language permanently but came to accept that change was inevitable

Key Definition: Prescriptive grammar — a set of rules that prescribes how language ought to be used, often based on the usage of a particular social group or historical period, and treating deviations from these rules as errors.

Robert Lowth and the Latin Model

Robert Lowth was a Bishop and Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His grammar book was enormously influential, and many of the rules he proposed are still repeated in style guides and grammar textbooks today. Crucially, many of Lowth's rules were based not on how English actually works but on the structure of Latin, which was considered the model of a perfect language:

• Do not split an infinitive — In Latin, infinitives are single words (amare = to love), so they cannot be split. In English, infinitives are two words ("to love"), and splitting them ("to boldly go") is a natural feature of English syntax.
• Do not end a sentence with a preposition — Latin prepositions must precede their objects. In English, stranding a preposition at the end of a sentence ("What are you looking at?") is perfectly natural and has been used by English speakers for centuries.
• Do not use double negatives — Lowth argued that two negatives make a positive (as in mathematics). In fact, multiple negation is a standard feature of many languages and was a normal feature of English for most of its history (Chaucer used double and triple negatives extensively).

The linguist David Crystal (2006, The Fight for English) has pointed out that these rules were never based on observation of actual English usage — they were imposed from outside, based on a false analogy with Latin.

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The Rise of Descriptivism

Descriptivism is the approach that seeks to describe language as it is actually used, without making value judgements about which forms are correct or incorrect. Descriptivism is the approach adopted by modern linguistics.

Key Principles of Descriptivism

• All language varieties are rule-governed — Every dialect, accent, and language variety has its own systematic grammar. Non-standard English is not random or chaotic — it follows consistent rules that are simply different from the rules of Standard English.
• Language change is natural and inevitable — Languages have always changed and will continue to change. This change is not decay or corruption — it is a fundamental property of all living languages.
• No variety is inherently superior — From a purely linguistic perspective, no dialect or accent is better, clearer, more logical, or more expressive than any other. Value judgements about language varieties are social judgements, not linguistic ones.
• Usage determines correctness — If a large number of speakers use a form, it is, by definition, a feature of the language, not an error.

Key Descriptivist Figures