Bad Grammar: Language, Power, and Society

This first-year seminar in linguistics gets meta about the norms of academic language. Why are some linguistic practices considered “bad” or “incorrect” and others “standard” or “appropriate”? How is language used to create, reinforce, and contest existing social structures? We’ll consider the consequences of language and dialect differences in institutions like schools, the legal system, workplaces, and medical settings. Other topics include linguistic prescriptivism and (dis)ability, taboo language and euphemisms, and what it means to be “polite” (from a linguistic perspective).