Linguistic prescriptivism as social prescription

Abstract

Linguistic prescriptivism may stand in for or obscure less socially acceptable forms of prejudice, such as racism or sexism. These social attitudes themselves may in some cases be considered a form of prescriptivism: just as linguistic prescriptivism assigns hierarchical value to the naturally occurring diversity of linguistic varies, so does social prescriptivism assign hierarchical relations to social differences along other dimensions. This chapter will examine these issues through the lens of gender, particularly in regard to gendered, gender-neutral, and nonbinary terminology, including pronouns. Linguistic and gender prescriptivism are intertwined via the social and linguistic enforcement of a gender binary, and from differences between speakers in the legibility of nonbinary gender categories. These interactions are difficult to discern, because much like the expression of cultural prejudice through linguistic judgments, differences in attitudes about social gender may be masked by linguistic objections, and linguistic prescriptivism may contribute to the enforcement of the binary socially. Even within linguistics, the assumption of the gender binary may limit the ability of linguistic theory to account for language of and about nonbinary speakers.

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