The social role of language errors
People can be roughly divided into two types: those who wince at a misplaced apostrophe (check out my post here) or a dangling participle, and those who never notice, or care, at all.
Solecism, the grammatical slip that grates on one group and passes invisibly by the other, turns out to be doing more social work than either camp suspects.
Languages are fundamentally rule-based, fine, yet in small-scale societies nobody needs to police those rules; everyone is kin, or bound by alliance, and speech simply serves communication.
Problems start once societies grow, because language then has to do a second job: sorting who is inside the community from who is merely passing through. And scale is everything.
The biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar, of “Dunbar number” fame, whose books I’ve been devouring this year, has spent decades arguing that this second job may actually be the older, more fundamental one.
In his account (worked out in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, as well as Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships and Human Evolution), language evolved primarily to bond large groups together, doing more efficiently what grooming does for other primates, and gossip, in the neutral, deeper, more structural sense, became its main currency.
Dunbar argues that without gossip there would be no society. More recent work by Will Storr, where he looks at the status-regulating power of gossip, converges quite nicely with Dunbar.
But bonding groups creates a parasite problem: free riders, people who take the benefits of belonging without paying its costs. Dunbar and his colleague Daniel Nettle modelled this directly, and found that dialects are ideally suited to act as a mechanism for controlling free riders, providing that they change rapidly from one generation to the next. Because dialects are hard to fake unless learned early in life, they let a community sort genuine long-term members from opportunists pretending to belong.
As cities grow larger and more mixed, then, we’d expect exactly what we see: accents multiplying, slang cycling faster, grammar becoming a more contested battleground between groups rather than settling into one shared standard.
If Dunbar is right, that proliferation isn’t decay at all, it’s the machinery doing precisely what it evolved to do.