> Do you have any proof that "they were created specifically for the purpose of establishing an arbitrary class distinction"?

Apologies; you are correct that my assertion is overly strong. I should rather have said "although we can no longer ascertain for certain the purpose for which these rules were introduced, some believe the origin to be rooted in a desire for creating an arbitrary class distinction."

Many of the "rules" we were taught can be traced directly back to an ongoing movement in the relatively recent past (like within the last 100-300 years, I think) to regularize English according to Latin grammar. This includes rules like:

- never end a sentence with a preposition

- never begin a sentence with a conjunction

- never split an infinitive

But we can find literary examples breaking any of these rules going back further than the origins of the rules. The rules were made up by people who revered Latin and thought English ought to be more Latin-esque.

The correlation to class distinction comes from the fact that people who tended to study Latin and revered Latin in this manner were members of an aristocracy, theocracy, or similar upper class, and there are other instances of these groups' efforts to arbitrarily distinguish themselves as being distinct from and superior to other groups of people.

There are also more recent efforts in a similar vein, as well. For example, in the United States there is a dialect commonly practiced by Black people in certain areas called African American Vernacular English. This dialect has a number of characteristics that are frequently labeled as "uneducated" or constituting "poor grammar". Although it is not controversial to say that these characteristics are marked in General American dialects, the specific connotations of the labels are generally understood to be rooted in a desire to portray Black Americans as belonging to a lower class, regardless of each individual's actual socioeconomic status.

> Also known as "poor grammar".

No, markedness is not also known as "poor grammar". There is a huge distinction.

The notion of markedness is that, for some group of people, a given utterance will strike them as not being something they themselves would say. Markedness is always framed in terms of a cultural context, by which I mean that it is okay to say that Americans generally find the British "go on holiday" to be marked --- it sticks out in the American dialects. This is a subjective assessment.

But "poor grammar" specifically seeks to attribute a negative connotation to the utterance. It says suggest that people who construct such utterances are, somehow, uneducated, or else are outsiders. It says that they've done something that is objectively (not subjectively) incorrect or wrong.

> Yep, in those groups the utterance isn't considered poor grammar.

Not always. Again, the terms are distinct in intent.

I don't think most Americans would listen to an English person say "I will go on holiday" and call it "poor grammar". They might say "that sounds funny" or "I'd never say it that way" or whatever else, but I think most would not use a phrase with such a strongly negative connotation. Many Americans view people with English accents (specifically accents closer to Received Pronunciation, though others are included) as having increased intelligence or other intellectual merit, for whatever reason, and so they will avoid labeling the speech of such people to be "incorrect" or "wrong" or "bad"; they will instead simply label it as "different".

However, when many (especially white) Americans hear utterances like "I been going to the store" or "I done finished my homework" or "I ain't never seen such a thing", they will label those as "poor grammar". They are specifically making a negative assessment of such utterances.

But all the examples are considered equally marked in General American dialects.

So my desire to distinguish markedness from "poor grammar" is rooted in a desire to fight stigmatization. There is nothing inherently wrong with those latter examples I gave, especially because almost all native English speakers will understand their intents (at least generally) without issue.