this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
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When someone says "you sure is" instead of "you are", or wants to "axe" you a question, we are taught to consider them wrong. But they're not. They're just speaking a different dialect of English. Just like people from the UK call bathrooms "the loo", and people from India say "do the needful". There are loads of different dialect of English, and it's racist to consider the "black" dialect stupid or incorrect. It's not wrong, it's just another dialect.
It counts as a dialect when a significant number of people use a certain version of the language.
I’m getting the sense that correctness in language is a bit of a fool’s errand. It’s a relative term.
Yep. Language is only as good as it's ability to transfer information. English is a good language (IMHO), not because it has good rules to follow, but because it can be flexible in order to transfer new ideas. Want to steal a word from another language? Want to verb a noun? Want to create a new word by gluing two other words together? Want to add a new definition to an existing word? Yes, yes, yessir, and bet.