Language Science helps us challenge the traditional prescriptivist view of language and shift the paradigm to an exploratory and evolutionary view.

Language is constantly evolving. No, really, it is! Words like “podcast,” “selfie,” and “bromance” didn’t exist in the 20th century. New words come into being all the time, through a remarkable variety of processes. And ending a sentence with a preposition? Everybody does it these days! In most cases it would be awkward to follow the Victorian admonishment not to. Oh yeah, and splitting infinitives…we will if we want to!

In my experience teaching kids about historical language change, my students have found it hugely liberating to hear that the restrictive prescriptivist “rules” they’ve been taught about language were once different than they are today. And middle schoolers especially, being natural iconoclasts, are always righteously indignant when they learn that some of the stuffy conventions of formal academic grammar that their parents had to memorize as kids – like never ending a sentence with a preposition even though it’s sometimes super awkward – were straight up invented by the Victorian-era English upper class as an easy way to tell the “right” kind of people from the “wrong” kind just by having a simple conversation. I’ve taught about historical language change both as a way of celebrating and normalizing linguistic diversity, and as a prompt to get kids talking & thinking about cultural power dynamics around language. Either way, language evolution has been a favorite topic of all the grade levels I’ve taught, and it has sparked a lot of great discussion, exploration and reflection in my classes about language diversity and language equity.

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