Alazne Landa, on society and grammars

On 2 May, Alazne Landa (UPV/EHU) gave a talk at the Faculty of Philology and Translation entitled “Society and the ‘other’ grammars”.The labels of superiority or inferiority that are typically associated with certain language varieties are the result of social judgment, not the outcome of linguistic or scientific research. The stigma that society places on certain social groups is generally extended to the language variety used by them, whether it is a non-standard variety of a major language like English or a minority language spoken in any given region or by a relatively small number of people. From a scientific perspective no variety or language is more prestigious than any other as (i) they all are systematic and rule-governed, and (ii) we need information from them all to unravel the different ways there are to interpret and categorize reality.