In this article I discuss the persistence of non-standard past tense forms in traditional and modern dialect data in the face of strong prescriptive norms against such non-standard forms. Past tense forms likeshe drunkorthey sungare still encountered frequently, although prescriptive grammars have militated against such usage for over a century, as a detailed investigation of nineteenth-century grammar books can show. I will argue that an increasing insistence especially by British nineteenth-century grammarians on distinct paradigm forms likedrink – drank – drunkis based on a (mistaken) Latin ideal and that it has not carried much weight with the ‘average’ speaker for functional reasons: non-standard forms in can be functionally motivated and are more ‘natural’ past tense forms in the sense of Wurzel (1984).
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