pg: In linguistics a grammar is just a series of rules. "Proper English" is not a linguistic concept, it's a social concept.
If you were raised in a household and exposed to proper English input, your native language is proper English. You have accomplished nothing other than learning the language you were exposed to. Similarly, if you are born into a household that speaks Spanish or AAVE or Dutch (and are fed and otherwise not abused too significantly), you will learn one of those languages and become a fluent speaker without any conscious effort.
AAVE is no more "improper" Standard English than Spanish is improper Standard English.
Of course, if you're taking a course in school on Standard English and you choose to turn in a paper written in AAVE (or Spanish), you are likely not to get an A.
Well, I think the burden of proof is on you to show why language mistakes matter at all.
If I can understand what someone else said or wrote (or spelled!), then why do we need a central authority to determine what is correct vs incorrect? Isn't there a fairly significant incentive toward conformity for efficiency's sake?
It's as if there were a call for some central authority to critique the names people are given (which, incidentally, change over time just as languages do). It is my opinion that someone named, say, Shanikwa had about as much control over her name as anyone else does over his/her native grammar, and those who judge someone on the basis of their name are just as much playing the social judgment card as those who judge a person's native grammar. Doing so is purely a social status play, and has no useful/pragmatic significance or objective superiority.
The fact is, language changes over time like any other fashion. If you don't like a particular grammar or a particular fashion that is a matter of taste. I can look at someone's outfit and say "ooh, fashion mistake", but is there really any reason why I would find doing so useful?
You can make the argument that using Standard English (and wearing a suit) are useful social conventions to adopt when going to a job interview, but I think the usefulness of either judgment ends there.
"Well, I think the burden of proof is on you to show why language mistakes matter at all."
Most importantly, because they inhibit efficient communication among parties. The lesser problem is that they might signal low educational status and/or incompetence: I know there is no such thing as "standard English," but you can get pretty close to it through guides like Diana Hacker's _Rules for Writers_. The further you get from this thing that's close to standard English, the more likely you are to sound incompetent or incomprehensible.
If someone comes into a job interview -- or YC interview -- speaking AAVE, or some wildly non-standard form of English, they're probably signaling that they haven't figured out how to speak, if not "proper" English, then a form of English that will allow them to communicate with high-level technical workers. They're not likely to get the job or the funding or the lawsuit won or whatever it is that they're trying to accomplish. _That's_ the problem.
There isn't a central authority because there doesn't need to be: as Foucault might argue, there are merely different loci of power or force that tend to create webs of what is acceptable or not in a given situation.
"The fact is, language changes over time like any other fashion. If you don't like a particular grammar or a particular fashion that is a matter of taste."
Which is all very interesting until you're applying for a job or writing a research paper and you can't write something very close to standard English, at which point you're not going to be able to achieve what you want to.
"You can make the argument that using Standard English (and wearing a suit) are useful social conventions to adopt when going to a job interview, but I think the usefulness of either judgment ends there."
I don't. The fundamental issue is what you signal and how efficiently you communicate. Whether you wear a suit or not has little to do with how you communicate verbally or in writing; whether you can speak something akin to standard English matters enormously.
>I know there is no such thing as "standard English," but you can get pretty close to it through guides like Diana Hacker's _Rules for Writers_.
The problem comes then when we try to say "this is Standard English <refer to guide on English>". The books many people feel represent "proper" English are often full of nonsense propagate mindlessly by people who learned what they were told was "proper" English. If I had a nickel for every time somebody regurgitated a "rule" derived from "A Short Introduction to English Grammar" by Lowth, I'd be a very rich man indeed.
Ultimately, setting a standard form of a language ends up devolving into Lowth style shibboleths designed to create an in-group and an out-group usable as a basis for discrimination but not necessarily useful for communication.
The ideas in my post are barely mentioned in the last paragraph of your post: that's why I wrote it. I think you underestimate the extent to which being able to speak and write in standard English is important. That's what pg implied in his original post, and he's right. Maybe standard English is a "fashion," as you put it, but that's not very useful: what's more useful is to note that being able to master this "fashion" is important in terms of communicating effectively.
I'd say it's no more important than, say, mastering the knowledge that showering before a job interview is useful. But because it's language people feel inclined to state the obvious.
If you were raised in a household and exposed to proper English input, your native language is proper English. You have accomplished nothing other than learning the language you were exposed to. Similarly, if you are born into a household that speaks Spanish or AAVE or Dutch (and are fed and otherwise not abused too significantly), you will learn one of those languages and become a fluent speaker without any conscious effort.
AAVE is no more "improper" Standard English than Spanish is improper Standard English.
Of course, if you're taking a course in school on Standard English and you choose to turn in a paper written in AAVE (or Spanish), you are likely not to get an A.