What is Standard English? My answer to that question is 1,248 pages long: the fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage (2022). I’m no arbiter of language, mind you: I simply declare what the consensus now is among professional writers and speakers. Language changes, and certain things that were once considered wrong (self-deprecating as opposed to self-depreciating) can become right. That typically happens slowly. Today in print, self-deprecating appears 25 times as often as self-depreciating. It would be foolishly out of touch with the facts of language to keep insisting on the older phrasing, which has become defunct.

In my entry for Standard English, I acknowledge that although “this is a troublesome term,” it’s essentially “the English used by educated people.” Every language evolves a standard form: It’s the prestige dialect that, over time, acquires a literary tradition. There is a Standard French, a Standard Mandarin, a Standard Thai, and a Standard Swahili. It’s always an aspirational standard, since nobody anywhere speaks the standard form unfailingly. Sometimes there can be more than one broad standard, as with American English and British English.

Speaking of which . . . In March of last year, British teachers launched a series of attacks on Standard English. In a U.K. publication called The Conversation, there appeared assertions that Standard English worsens socioeconomic and racial inequality. Any preference for Standard English is said to be a form of discrimination called linguicism: “Schoolchildren who naturally say ‘aks’ (or any other nonstandard form of English) are tasked with the extra burden of distinguishing between how they speak and how they are expected to write. Conversely, no such barrier is faced by children who grow up speaking standard English at home.” The authors asserted that “the idea that any variation from standard English is incorrect (or, worse, unprofessional or uneducated) is a smokescreen for prejudice.”

The conclusion, then, is that we shouldn’t teach it. In a different piece in March 2022, The Conversation urged that Standard English “represents an unacceptably ideological influence on the curriculum.” The piece referred to “the absurdity, the baselessness and, crucially, the pernicious impact of deeming any one form of English to be ‘correct.’”

People talk. People reason. People sing. Imagine having a choir teacher attacked for not reflecting “the way I usually sing.” Imagine a teacher of logic being attacked for not reflecting “how people usually think.”

One view, then, is that the very notion of linguicism is a noxious smoke screen for being anti-education.

And yet the critics have a point. Imagine being a third-grade teacher with a classroom of 25 children of diverse backgrounds. You’re leading a class in reading, and you’re having the children read aloud. Do you say that the way one of your students says “aks” for ask is “wrong” or “incorrect”? Do you keep demanding that the child try saying it the way you do? “But that’s not how my parents say it,” the child intones, “and I’ve never said it that way.”

“Well, that’s the way educated people say it, and that’s how we’re saying it in this classroom.”

Only five of your students say it that way. Does that mean you drill them in front of the others until they learn to put the s and the k in the traditional sequence?

If you were the sixth-grade band director, perhaps you’d keep drilling the students until they could play a proper E-flat, with the correct fingering. The piece you’re playing demands a D followed by an E-flat. Playing an F is just wrong. Let’s try it again.

But there’s something different about language. A priggish insistence that all dialects are “inferior” to Standard English might indeed play out, in a given classroom circumstance, as “a smokescreen for prejudice.”

Teachers at all levels need to know something about linguistic variation and dialect. They should be humane, understanding, and encouraging. That’s placing hope in the future.

The difficulty is how to teach Standard English while not denigrating other varieties. The book has yet to be written on how and why such figures as Lester Holt, Barack Obama, and Oprah Winfrey acquired their idiolects (their distinctive speech habits). Some years ago, when I was interviewing Supreme Court justices, I spent an hour with Justice Clarence Thomas, who grew up speaking a Georgia dialect called “Geechee.” When I asked him at what age he began speaking Standard English, he said not until his early twenties. Was it Catholic school, I asked, or self-study?

“There was a lot of self-study,” Justice Thomas said. “I mean, what are your choices? Everything is done in Standard English. . . . I had to learn English. I mean, what are my choices?” (The full interview can be seen at lawprose.org.)

He was a realist. If you’re ambitious, you acquire the ability to speak and write in the standard form of the language. What’s unpleasant to many people is that standard languages have a political component: They’re always the “privileged dialect” customarily used by the people in power, whether it’s in Paris or Beijing or Bangkok or Tanzania. It’s not that standard languages started out inherently superior in any way; it’s just that they’ve been endorsed by history and literature. They’ve acquired a tradition, and they’ve become the linguistic currency for the important affairs of the nations where they’re used.

Perhaps the good news is that nobody in America grows up flawlessly speaking and writing Standard American English. That just doesn’t happen. For anyone who seeks to acquire it, it has to be worked for.

While we’re encouraging tolerance and understanding, let’s not trash our linguistic and literary heritage. Nobody should be discouraged from acquiring what society regards as educated linguistic habits. That would be pernicious.