Is there such a thing as "good English" or "un buon italiano"?

Photo Credit: Romain Vignes on Unsplash

A friend of mine recently wrote in to an Italian network to discuss a "lady" who had been complaining about the lack of "good Italian" being spoken generally, and "slipping standards" is a topic that comes up frequently particularly in letters to newspapers etc. Readers bemoan the misuse of apostrophes or the splitting of infinitives and other stylistic features. Such criticism, particularly when considering the young or students, and the idea that language is "in decline" has been around for at least 4000 years or more as a Sumerian scribe complained as cited in an article by Johnson in The Economist:

"A junior scribe is too concerned with feeding his hunger... He does not pay enough attention to the scribal art" 

What is language?

It seems to me, however, that this is based on a false premise of what language is. It is basically a semiotic system of meaning making and not a "thing". Reifying a process such as creating meaning through signs will lead us into a mistaken view. We are surrounded by language from the moment we wake until the moment we drift into sleep and it may well invade our dreams too. We use language with ourselves and each other and negotiate meanings and our very reality in social interactions. The teaching of language. however, has bought into the idea of language as a "thing". Structuralist accounts of grammatical systems dating back to Saussure, who saw language as arbitrary signs, yes, but once assigned to a signified they became relatively stable. Influential bodies such as the Council of Europe or Examination boards also create a series of measures and descriptors of this thing called language and even the Common European Framework, building on Hymes' (1972) notions of communicative competence, with its "can do" statements, see language as a tool that you have to acquire to be able to do something else: yes, once again it is seen as a "thing".  This is echoed by the American ACTFL guidelines as well, which measure proficiency as something that you "can do" with a language. The glaring question that is facing us, however, is this: is language a tool? Is it a thing? or should we rather be considering it a process, more akin to languaging, a social semiotic that creates our very reality on a whole series of levels. 

Language as languaging

Poststructuralists, influenced by the thinking of philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault see language as being the dough we use to create our reality. Foucault sees this as inextricably linked to specific moments in history, where the conditions that exist lead to dominant discourses which mould our reality and knowledge, and where power is the means to create new discourses by means of new discourses. From this viewpoint the world we are living in now, for instance, at least here in Northern Italy is one of surveillance, for example, where we buy into the arguments we are surrounded by and further their effectiveness by the fact that we actually monitor ourselves. One example of this is the diet discourse, for instance, where we monitor carefully what we eat because of the messages we receive from those around us in our particular historical moment. These are not necessarily the messages that were sent in the past, nor may they be the same in the future, and often they are not necessarily based on fact. Intermittent fasting is one such discourse within the diet culture, where it is said to be good to starve yourself, but is it true? Well, it doesn't actually matter whether it is "true" or not. If the message is spread by enough people then others will "buy into it" and it will become a reality. Power from a foucauldian viewpoint emerges from contrasting discourses. Another example, to return to language learning is our examination system, which is obsessed with measuring and accountability. We measure the level of a language learner... but how do we know that your language level one day is the same as it is the next? Once again we return to the reification of language as a tool to use to do something else, when it is, in fact, probably closer to a process.

Baynham (2015) cited in Kramsch (2017) refers to language as "a process in which identities are constructed through "repeated positionings" according to the demands of the situation. Language is flexible, it is a part of us, subjective and reaching out to the other at the same time and the meanings I attribute to one word may not be the same ones you do. By negotiating and "expressing ourselves" we reach new meanings and work together with our linguistic dough to create different types of bread. Kramsch (2009) looks at multilinguals coming to grips with new languages and the way a knowledge of differing languages can interweave our awareness both of the new and the old language. There are those who are excited by the prospect of "escaping" from the ritualistic, formulaic nature of the everyday phrase in their first language into the mystery of the new one. It carries with it adventure and the chance to broaden your horizons, learn new sounds, new visual shapes such as the beauty of Chinese characters, with their connotations of wisdom or the intricacy of Arabic writing, reminiscent of the exotic desert and the Arabian nights. Other learners, on the other hand, cling to their familiar first language and are afraid to leave the comfort of their own identities, they do not dare to pronounce the new sounds in the same way as a native speaker would and they may even impose their own grammar rules or collocations on the new language. A friend of mine, for instance, who speaks good Italian, still talks about traffic lights being "open" instead of saying the "light is green" and when challenged, says: "Well, that's how we say it in Albanian." Neither of these positions is wrong or right but they serve to show how closely our language is a part of us and is far more than a "tool" to be used to do something with.

So, what about error, then?

Of course, communication is difficult at the best of times, and it involves good faith and at least an attempt to stick to the Gricean maxims, and some skill in pragmatics. We must assign at least some elements of meaning to the same things or, like the old man in Peter Bichsel's story "A table is a table", who decided to randomly assign his own words to things, we may end up being socially isolated and unable to communicate with anyone else.  Given, however, that we do share basic meanings of words the question of error is more subtle. Error is the "abnormal" but it is also the creative, the unusual and exists on a range of levels. When you approach a new language it becomes a lens through which you then view your first language and associations arise on intra and interlinguistic levels that mean that your experience of that language will be unique and this, in turn, is part of making it your own. The name "Heidelberg" in German, is to me, forever bound up with the idea of woods and fruit because something in my mind associates it with "Heidelbeere" or blueberries. I don't know why this happens but it makes for a very positive image of the name. In Kramsch's account of a Japanese learner of German, however, the same name was completely different. The "Hei" was likened to "Hai" or shark and "del" was similar to the Japanese verb for to "emerge" so the name for this learner was associated to an image of a shark emerging from a mountain. These images are incredibly rich and Kramsch, in fact, argues for the multilingual subjectivity of language learning. Language, she says is symbolic on the level of signs but also indexical, in that it may point to a whole series of other referents that exist in our consciousness, or in the outside world, so that a house for one person may be completely different from a house for another. On yet another level it is iconic. We are attracted to the images of the written form, the letters or characters as mentioned above. 

Bringing all this together into the language that each and every one of us shares with each other (and ourselves) every day is a magical process of transformation and the art of listening to others and entering their worlds immensely rewarding. New meanings are created and new realities forged, new discourses created and identities changed. Reducing language to the level of the apostrophe in the wrong place seems to be such a sad reduction of what language might be. So, to answer my initial question, I would say that there is no such thing as "Good English" because English is a process which is in constant flux. There are shared meanings and new ones which emerge from particular interactions and particular historical moments.  COVID-19 is possibly one of the most memorable terms to emerge over the past year and yet it did not exist at the beginning of 2019. Trump's discourse around "the steal" is another example of language in context. So let's celebrate the creativity of the process and go with the magic of the word.

Reference

Hymes, D. H. (1972). On Communicative Competence. In Pride, J. B., & Holmes, J. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics, 269-293. Baltimore, USA: Penguin Education, Penguin Books Ltd.