Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, linguist, teacher, slacker. This week, we're making requests.
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Language change is an ever-entertaining process to watch. And I think I might have found a little bit of language change in action. Let me walk you through my thinking; tell me where I'm wrong?
I, like everyone I think, have spent a lot of the past twelve months watching YouTube until the small hours of the morning. Among the may changes YouTube is having on our society via the content-creation it enables as well as the technological barriers it shatters, is a profound effect on the English language. Some of these changes are just an increase in common words like content and channel. Others are new forms and uses of old words; I'd argue that the use of likes as a plural noun indicating the number of people who have enjoyed a video may not have originated with YouTube but YouTube sure as hell popularized it. And finally, there are changes in language functions, like, for example, asking viewers to click on the like button by saying, "smash that like button!"
Let's talk about language functions for a second. Communication, at its most basic level, is about transmitting one person's idea to another person. To do this we use words (mostly). The way in which we arrange our words to accomplish a specific communicative goal is a function. In other words, we know that, in English, to get someone to bring us a glass of water, we should use a sentence that contains the phrase "could you" or "would you." (A "please" probably ought to be thrown in for good measure, but you get the idea.) The function expressed by those phrases, in that context, is making a request.
Before we get any further into this topic, let me take a second to address the prescriptivist elephant in the room. Prescriptivism is the idea that there is a right answer to questions of how someone should use English grammar. If you've ever been told that you can't end a sentence with a preposition or that you should never split your infinitives, you've experienced prescriptivism. Those two rules were invented as a way of trying to make English tidier and bear very little resemblance to how English is, and has always been, used. Defining English grammar and usage rules by how the language is actually spoke* falls under a different camp we call descriptivism.
As a teacher, the challenge is to make sure that the grammar rules we impose on students comes from a descriptive point of view and not a prescriptive. So, in other words, if a student hands in a paper telling me that the ramen at Sato's is "delicious af" I can explain why that might not be appropriate in a business proposal but I shouldn't tell them that it is incorrect English. Because it's not. My obligation to my students is to make sure they know how to communicate clearly and effectively, not to tell them what words they can and can't use.
Which brings me back to YouTube, requests, and language change. By now, we all know the routine:
A video creator gets to the end of their presentation or narration and address the camera. They smile, maybe wave, and thank the viewer for watching. Then they'll make their request for the viewer to click on the like button and to subscribe to their channel. The end.
Now, this is a very generalized formula, but one that I think holds true for many creators across many different genres. And it is presumably a good one for it to have gained so much traction. So, let's look at how our creator makes their request.
There are a few ways they could do this; EnglishClub.com lists a full 70 different ways to make a request. But, let's assume they're going for a casual, friendly tone and that they're going for a broad audience. At the same time, let's stipulate that they don't want to come across as needy and desperate. And let's assume they're going to use a full sentence. We might see something like: "Hi, thanks for watching. If you'd like to see more videos like this one, please click the like and subscribe buttons. Thanks again!"
The change I think I might be seeing happen comes in the shortening of the middle sentence (If...buttons.) to a simple, "like and subscribe," a grammatical demand rather than request. This is not anything new. We (native speakers) tend to do this all the time. Think about any time you made a request of your siblings when you were children. How subtle was the difference between "Bring me a drink?" and "Bring me a drink!" And what I would argue here is that there's a difference in tone between siblings hollering at each other, turning requests into demands, and YouTubers trying to gain more subscribers. It's not inconceivable that the YouTuber would demand that people subscribe; doing so might play into their image or their perceived clout. But I don't think that would be the case for most creators.
So, the question is, does the tone used by YouTubers when issuing a shortened form of "if...like and subscribe" match that when English speakers change a request into a demand both grammatically and tonally, or is their tone consistent with making a request even while the grammar changes to that of a demand?
I don't know. This is just the first step in the research process. From here, there's a lot of reading, reformulating the question, and deciding how to best to test the idea. It might take a while. But I'm curious. If you have any thoughts or ideas on the matter, uh, would you mind leaving me a comment?
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Stay strong, stay curious. Learn something.**
Joel
*If you just cringed and scolded me for not using "spoken," you just might be a prescriptivist! (Not really. And apologies to Jeff Foxworthy.)
**Not a request. :)