this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
17 points (94.7% liked)
Linguistics
625 readers
10 users here now
Welcome to the community about the science of human Language!
Everyone is welcome here: from laypeople to professionals, Historical linguists to discourse analysts, structuralists to generativists.
Rules:
- Instance rules apply.
- Stay on-topic. Specially for more divisive subjects.
- Post sources whenever reasonable to do so.
- Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims.
- Have fun!
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is fair. Usually when I hear "prescriptive" I have a knee-jerk reaction to it as something bad because it's usually used to refer to people using made-up rules to enforce systems of oppression rather than fight against them like inclusive language does, but I hadn't thought about it as "prescriptivism for good."
The knee-jerk reaction is understandable, since most prescriptions are of the exclusionary type. And at the same time, since linguists say "we're describing, not prescribing", people create a false opposition between both things. And, well, if description is scientific and good the prescription ends as "unscientific and bad", through that opposition.