Sorry, there's no such thing as 'correct grammar'

At last -a voice in a national 'paper that's articulating a point of view that is linguistically coherant:

There is just "the grammar" and one of the great failings of education today is that neither teachers or pupils know it. In fact, we would neither be able to speak nor understand if we didn't know it. A three-year-old who says "I bringed it" is expressing the grammar through the structure she has learned which indicates past happenings. It just so happens that the "ed" ending isn't the customary way of doing it with that verb. So she knows "grammar" but not the grammar of that particular word in that particular context

Quite so: if you and I can understand it or at least come up with a couple of possible interpretations, then grammar has likely been used (and the real arguments about 'correctness should really be about how best to elegantly express thoughts with the minimum of ambiguity). "Correct" is usually an attmept to assert one dialect over another; normally a so-called standard English over a regional or socio-cultural variety. And let's make no bones about it: the English being asserted is actually the dialect that happens to be the one traditionally favoured by those in government and historically derives from that used by landed plutocrats. They assumed  others would speak like them if they were important. -You would know the ruled by their lack of mastery of the King's English ie, as used at court, and the by those without access to the money to educate their children in elite institutions. It's time for the rest of us to stop playing that game with them.

The truth is that the rest of us have as much right as the elite to put our cultural artefacts 'out there' and that includes our speech forms.

language is owned and controlled by everybody and what we do with it seems to be governed by various kinds of consent, operating through the social groups of our lives. Social groups in society don't swim about in some kind of harmonious melting pot. We rub against each other from very different and opposing positions, so why we should agree about language use and the means of describing it is beyond me.

It's time to stop talking about 'correctness' and name the beast for what it is: cultural prejudice and power games. Comprehension not spurious correctness should be the sole or at least main test. The arguments about 'correctness' should really be about how best to elegantly express thoughts with the minimum of ambiguity and the most appropriately to the audience. And incidentally this criterion would show that elite-speakers are often less than able communicators if their socio-linguistic privilege is removed -they often rely on the fact that others are expected to speak like them to avoid having to understand and speak in other forms. It's the intra-English equivalent of English speakers tending not to learn other languages because 'everyone' speaks English.

Sorry, there's no such thing as 'correct grammar' | Michael Rosen | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk