"Correct" English Is Just the Version Powerful Countries Speak

The “Unlearn English” Series (Post 9 of 12)

“'Correct' English isn't a linguistic fact. It's a decision made by whoever had the power to make it stick.”

“Correct” English Is Just the Version Powerful Countries Speak, and It's Time to Say So Plainly.

Every English learner has been told, at some point, that there's a “correct” version of the language, and every other version, a regional dialect, a Caribbean or West African or South Asian variety, a heavily accented but perfectly grammatical construction, is a deviation from it. This idea is treated as neutral, scientific fact in classrooms and textbooks worldwide. It is not neutral, and it was never really about grammar. It's a power arrangement wearing a grammar textbook as a disguise.

Linguistics settled this argument decades ago. There is no scientific basis for ranking one systematic, rule-governed dialect of English above another. Every major variety of English, British Received Pronunciation, American Standard, Nigerian English, Singlish, Jamaican Patois, African American Vernacular English, follows its own consistent internal grammar. Linguists studying these varieties don't find chaos; they find rules, just different rules. The idea that one of these is “correct” English and the rest are “broken” English isn't a linguistic finding. It's a value judgment smuggled in as one.

So why does one version get called correct? Because the countries that colonized, industrialized, and later dominated global media, finance, and academia got to decide which version of English counted as the standard, and then exported that standard through empire, education systems, and testing bodies. “Correct” English isn't the most logical or grammatically superior version. It's the version spoken by whoever held the most economic and political power when the standard got written down and enforced. That's not an opinion. That's the actual history of how standardization happened.

The real-world cost of pretending otherwise. Learners are told their perfectly systematic home dialect, or the English their community has spoken fluently for generations, is a mistake to be corrected out of them. This isn't a harmless teaching convention. It tells millions of fluent, capable English speakers that the way people around them actually talk is a defect, while a version spoken by a smaller, historically dominant group gets treated as the neutral baseline everyone else is failing to reach.