Conservapedia:Devolution of language

Oh, Andy, Andy, Andy. How can you allow this?

Let's start with this point: "devolution" is, by and large, a meaningless concept. Evolution, whether in linguistics or biology, is an inherently nondirected progress — a language or genome changes according to rather haphazard, and those changes survive because it makes the object fitter for use, or sometimes (in the case of languages or, say, peacock tails) just plain cooler. It's very seldom that a language is significantly reduced in expressive power; even in situations where a word such as, say, "like" or "dude" or "fuck" becomes heavily overloaded, context and intonation replace and/or augment a word with what might be called out-of-band data — if I, like, write a sentence, and it's all filled with the same word, like, over and over again, and I stress each clause with an upturned inflection at the end? like this? the meaning is still exquisitely clear, even if it sounds incredibly grating when you sound it out in your head.

There's an important distinction to be mentioned here — prescriptivism, which treats certain registers of language as "proper" and describes them in terms of how a language should be used, and descriptivism, which acknowledges the differences between different registers of speech but reports them as they exist rather than how they should be used. The difference can be seen in the "official" forms of the English and French languages; the two most important dictionaries in English, the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster's Third International, are strongly descriptivist in their current incarnations (the OED in particular radically so), while the Académie Française has traditionally positioned itself more as a prescriptivist referee of the language, since the 20th century in particular trying to reduce the incursion of foreign (especially English) words into the language.

While it's fair to point out that certain usages should be avoided because they demonstrably reduce the ability to comprehend communications (the frequent confusion of "flaunt" and "flout" being a particularly egregious one), politicizing differences between speech registers, especially as class markers, is as old as civilization — the Bible's "shibboleth" story is one of the oldest that most Westerners will be familiar with, in which a difference in accent between two Israelite tribes could mean death, and Charlemagne was only one of many who tried to stop the dissolution of Classical Latin into the langue d'oïl (i.e. Old French) In medieval England, the common people spoke English while the upper classes largely spoke Norman French. German-speaking Jews treated Yiddish-speakers as illiterates. Even now, "unofficial" languages and dialects — African-American English, Belarussian, virtually any language in France that isn't standard French — are treated as the languages of savages and illiterates. This is the mentality we're dealing with here, combined with a somewhat inappropriate (but seldom challenged) attitude that the Classical world is superior to the modern world.

Needless to say, as arch-conservatives, Andy Schlafly and his crew tend to have a somewhat snobby attitude towards language. The concept of linguistic devolution only makes sense if you are a language snob, and in fact is pretty easily subverted just by looking at the history of, say, French. But that doesn't stop the Conservapedians from wading into the swamp of conservative folk linguistics, and it's amazing when they actually get anything right.