Reply #50: Human speech is incredibly ordered. There is not a person [View All]

[Kelly Rupert]

who speaks without following stringent grammatical rules.

What you're referring to is not linguistics, but grammar. Grammar is the study of the rules of the prestige (or "standard") form of a language, and those rules indeed change--three hundred years ago, you would have to say "my car is repairing" instead of "my car is being repaired" to not be scoffed at. In Shakespeare's time, if you rhymed "meat" with "beet" instead of "hate," you sounded uneducated.

Linguistics is the study of language as she is spoken. The Queen of England and a ghetto youth speak equally ordered, equally complex, equally rule-bound language. And if I come across anything that breaks a rule, then the rule is inadequate.