Letter: English ain't broke, so why try to fix it?

Sir: Tony Fairman's polemic (9 July) is factually incorrect and misses the point. It is incorrect to say that scientific linguistics concludes that 'no part of language should be discarded as malformed or bad'. On the contrary, it is no part of the scientific enterprise, in linguistics or anywhere else, to say what should or should not be discarded: that is what polemicists such as Mr Fairman do.

But to invoke linguistics - even expertly - in this debate is to miss the point, which is that a failure to master what Mr Fairman calls the standard dialect puts one at an increasingly serious disadvantage. Call it what you like, 'correct English' or 'the standard dialect' is an international medium of communication, and there are practical reasons for its being accepted as canonical, in the same way that there were good practical reasons for regarding Tuscan and High German as the national tongues.

Of course linguistic deviance is not bad in itself (what is?). But it is unfortunately the children of this country who suffer for it, not their broad-minded teachers.

Yours faithfully,

COLIN HOWSON

The London School of Economics and Political Science

London, WC2