Which is more important in your everyday life: to understand the language you speak and to recognise the intricate grammatical mechanisms that underlie it or to just speak it and hope that you’ll be understood? Let me rephrase that question. In linguistic terms, do you prize competence over performance? Do you feel that it is justified for you to spend hours on end in school learning the grammar of your native language, when you know perfectly well how to speak it?

"Why is it that standard language grammar is considered proper and all deviations are the devil’s work?"

If there’s one debate on language that rages both in academic and non-academic camps alike it is this. For linguists, this debate is the crux of all theoretical approaches and the various schools that promote them. As the field undergoes paradigm shifts (radical changes in main stream theory within a discipline), it is how this question is answered that defines where you stand. In the 20th century, the paradigm has slowly moved from focusing on competence, i.e. the (Chomskyan) generative school, to focusing on performance, i.e. the understanding that language is more than the sum of its structural units.

What this understanding spells for the non-academic, who sits behind the desk filling in the gaps of yet another grammar exercise, is freedom. The education system is slowly catching up to the fact that teaching the mechanisms of standard language, which is usually a monolithic relic of the past and has very little to do with authentic use, isn’t really helping. For language learners, understanding the grammar is useful for one thing and one thing only: learning to write properly. However, the problem persists: why is it that standard language grammar is considered proper and all deviations are the devil’s work? In languages with a clearly defined standard variety (such as English and Finnish) the answer is simple: the standard is promoted because it’s convenient. It is the glue that holds language together, or so we are taught to think.

In Finland, the argument of competence versus performance is something that anyone can take part in. We all know that standard Finnish (or yleiskieli) is unnatural and exists only in writing. In TV shows and movies, the more the dialect spoken resembles standard Finnish, the more it sounds unnatural to the point where you have no other choice but to either mute the sound or cover your ears. So why are people from abroad and expats forced to take gruelling Finnish language tests that even native speakers of the language would have a hard time acing so that they can act as full members of society?

I’ve devoted a lot of time to looking into language attitudes and especially the strife between standard and non-standard varieties of English. What I’ve found out is a general consensus that the standard variety should remain the variety taught in schools and used in media and education, for example. However, another common understanding is that it should be reserved for the written medium only. Language proficiency comes in many guises of which writing properly is only one. Emphasising the standard variety as the only correct one is a folly and, when you think of it, a non sequitur. After all, we all know how to use language well before we learn how to write it properly. Having the government dictate what is correct goes against human nature and sounds quite totalitarian, actually.

Instead of teaching language through repetition of outdated exercises that draw from an outdated grammar of an outdated variety of language, attention should be diverted to learning language in the way it’s used in everyday situations, no matter how far removed the varieties used are from the standard. I’m not rooting for a dramatic change in the way our education system is built or in the existing paradigms within linguistic disciplines, but I’m trying to draw attention towards a fallacy that has prevailed for aeons in the way how language use is described.

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