page_title: Linguistic prescription
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Linguistic prescription / Origins
caption_attribution_description: Hiéroglyphes, temple de Komombo.
context_page_description: Linguistic prescription, or prescriptive grammar, is the attempt to establish rules defining preferred or correct use of language. These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes informed by linguistic purism, such normative practices may suggest that some usages are incorrect, illogical, lack communicative effect, or are of low aesthetic value. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use.
  Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach what a particular society perceives as a correct or best form, or advise on effective and stylistically felicitous communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to language change; if radical, it may produce neologisms.
  Prescriptive approaches to language are often contrasted with the descriptive approach, employed in academic linguistics, which observes and records how language is actually used. The basis of linguistic research is text analysis and field study, both of which are descriptive activities.
context_section_description: Historically, linguistic prescriptivism originates in a standard language when a society establishes social stratification and a socio-economic hierarchy. The spoken and written language usages of the authorities (state, military, church) are preserved as the standard language. Departures from this standard language may jeopardise social success (see social class). Sometimes, archaisms and honorific stylizations may be deliberately introduced or preserved to distinguish the prestige form of the language from contemporary colloquial language. Likewise, the style of language used in ritual also differs from everyday speech. Special ceremonial languages known only to a select few spiritual leaders are found throughout the world; Liturgical Latin has served a similar function for centuries.
  When a culture develops a writing system, orthographic rules for the consistent transcription of culturally important works (laws, scriptures, contracts, poetry, etc.) allow a large number of speakers to understand written communications easily, and across multiple generations.
  Early historical trends in literacy and alphabetization were closely tied to the influence of various religious institutions. Western Christianity propagated the Latin alphabet. Eastern Orthodoxy spread the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. Judaism used the Hebrew alphabet, and Islam the Arabic alphabet. Hinduism used the Devanagari script. In certain traditions, strict adherence to prescribed spellings and pronunciations was and remains of great spiritual importance. Islamic naming conventions and greetings are notable examples of linguistic prescription being prerequisite to spiritual righteousness. Another commonly cited example of prescriptive language usage closely associated with social propriety is the system of honorific speech in Japanese.
  Most, if not all, widely spoken languages demonstrate some degree of social codification in how they conform to prescriptive rules. Linguistic prestige is a central research topic within sociolinguistics. Notions of linguistic prestige apply to different dialects of the same language and also to separate, distinct languages in multilingual regions. Prestige level disparity often leads to diglossia: speakers in certain social contexts consciously choose a prestige language or dialect over a less prestigious one, even if it is their native tongue.
  Government bureaucracy tends toward prescriptivism as a means of enforcing functional continuity. Such prescriptivism dates from ancient Egypt, where bureaucrats preserved the spelling of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt into the Ptolemaic period through the standard usage of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
caption: Ptolemaic hieroglyphics from the Temple of Kom Ombo
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