English learners often say things like “Wait me” or “What time it is?” After correcting mistakes like these for the 157838901st time, I started to question why “wait” needs to be followed by “for” and why questions need inversion. 🤔

At a certain point, I realized that these features of English grammar don’t need to exist. “Wait me” and “What time it is?” are perfectly understandable, not to mention more efficient than the “correct” versions of these sentences.

This may sound blasphemous to many of us, but let’s take a break from being Standard English teachers for just one moment and see how its “non-standard” varieties sometimes do a better job of making grammatical sense.

Unnecessary Grammar

First and foremost, Standard English grammar can be unnecessary. The -s that we add to verbs following “he,” “she,” and “it” is a good example. “I dance,” “you dance,” “we dance,” “they dance” is correct. Yet, “he dance” is wrong. But what is the point of making an exception just for “he,” “she,” and “it”?

It turns out that there are actually dialects of English that don’t bother to make this exception. In certain dialects of English in the U.K., people would say “she dance” instead of “she dances.” And in other dialects, people add an -s to all present tense verbs!

As an English tutor, I almost wish these versions of English had become the standard, so I wouldn’t have to keep correcting students. 😅

Another thing that Standard English could simplify is its questions. I’m sure we’ve all spent more time than we’d like correcting questions like, “Where do you from?” or “Where are you come from?” 

It turns out that English dialects have different ways of asking questions. In Scottish English, it’s OK to ask a question with “have” without using the helping verb “do.” In other words, “Had they a good day?” is perfectly fine; no need for “Did they have a good day?” 

Yet another unnecessary feature of Standard English is the need to use the verb “be.” Interestingly, in African American Vernacular English (AAVE),* the verb “be” is often omitted. For example, in Standard English grammar, we abbreviate “she is” to “she’s,” but AAVE speakers realized that they could make it even shorter: “she pretty.”

*Note: "African American Vernacular English" does not refer to English as it is spoken by all African Americans. AAVE is "most commonly spoken today by urban, working-class African Americans" and is also rich in variation of its own.

Imprecise Grammar

There are also many aspects of Standard English grammar that are imprecise. The most well-known example is the lack of a separate pronoun for the plural “you.” Let’s say you were speaking to an audience or a group of friends. How would you address them? “You all”? “Everyone here today”?

Most languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Germanic and Romance languages) have a separate pronoun for the plural “you.” However, this pronoun does not exist in English … at least not in Standard English.

Many dialects came up with solutions for this. For example, Southern U.S. English-speakers have “you all” or “y’all" for short. In Pittsburgh (a town in Pennsylvania), people say “yinz” or “yunz”! And now many English-speakers around the world have started saying “you guys” or “you all,” though these aren’t proper Standard English.

Another imprecise aspect of Standard English grammar is that sentences like “Pat is happy” can mean both “Pat is happy now. (He got a lot of Christmas presents.)” or “Pat is usually happy.” When the verb is “be,” we need to use the context to tell if the speaker is talking about now or in general. 

Speakers of African American Vernacular English, however, distinguish between these two versions of “be” with grammar. “Pat happy” means “Pat is happy now” whereas “Pat be happy” means “Pat is usually happy.”

👋 That’s it for now!

Of course, there are also aspects of English grammar that make me grateful. For example, I thank my lucky stars that English does not have grammatical gender. 

But, it would be nice if Standard English grammar learned a little from its “non-standard” cousins!