Summary Myth 1   ''The Meanings of Words Should Not be Allowed to Vary or Change''

It it universal characteristic that languages, their pronunciations, usage and meaning of words change all the time. Except Latin which nobody speaks.
The English language is full of words which have changed their meanings slightly or even dramatically over the centuries.
In al human languages there are many words which have more than one meaning, the context makes it obvious which meaning is intended.
Some people seem to think that it's unfortunate for languages to change, because they believe distinctions are being misused and therefore lost.
But languages are self-regulating systems, they can be left to take care of themselves.

Summary Myth 2   ‘’Some Languages are Just Not Good Enough’’

Looking at the languages spoken in the world today, we notice very wide differences in the use to which they are put. Most languages are the first language of community others have a more restricted range of use, like Latin, which use is even more restricted and used only by few people to read literature originally in that language.
Through time English has acquired the vocabulary to deal with new developments, this process is called borrowing.
The differences in roles that languages play make some people believe that languages are incapable when they not fulfill wide ranges of functions, it must have an appropriate vocabulary.
This is not based on logic, because languages may differ as to the way aspects of structure are handled, but they are all capable of expressing the same range of structural meanings.

Summary Myth 3   ‘’The Media are Ruining English’’

There is a morbid concern for the health of English. Today journalists are regarded as linguistic troublemakers, because of the immense extension and influence of the newspaper press. These are to a large extend in the hands of writers who have no respect for the propriety or reticence of language.
There are also complaints about spoken language through radio and television.
The top 20 complaints about language are related to grammar pronunciation and vocabulary.
Disliked usages are frequently assumed by grumblers to be new, a sign of modern decadence.
All these complaints seem to be false because the media are actually linguistic mirrors, they reflect current language usage and extend it.
Eventually English maintains its own pattern and keeps is organized, it regulates itself constantly.

Summary Myth 4:   ‘’French is a Logical Language’’

French people claim that their French is a logical language and distinguish itself from other languages because of their order and structure of sentences.
The argument most frequently advanced in defense of the logicality of French is based on word order: SVO à this means Subject + Verb + Object, this makes it direct and clear.
French is the only language to be of the SVO type and it is legitimate to ask how fundamental the SVO order is in French.

Perhaps the most important reason is the role French played in the development of the French culture.
Since French is the language of reason and logic, any French person who uses it improperly must be cognitively defective, irrational even mad. French is now more culture-related.
In 1980 politician Raymond Barre claimed: The first of the fundamental values of our civilization is the correct usage of our language, this completed French as a fundamental element of national identity.

The idea which people seem to find very hard is that languages cannot possess good or bad qualities; no language system can be shown to be clearer of more logical than any other language system. Where differences of clarity and logic are to be found is not in the language itself but in the abilities of different users of the language to handle it effectively.
It is the speakers who deserve our praise or blame and not the language.

Summary Myth 5 ‘’English Spelling is Kattastroffik’’

English spelling has many rules which makes it sometimes hard to understand and use.
The Old English referred to the Anglo-Saxons has given English the basic stock of words.
Ever since medieval times English has adopted cultural loanwords from French. Modern loanwords of French come with their present French spelling and a close approximation to French pronunciation. Then we’ve got technical terms for use in science which are often derived from Latin or Greek.
Scientists have to learn a mini-language of such elements. When such terms escape into common use they often cause spelling problems for the ordinary person.
These various subsystems are often marked by their own peculiar spelling correspondences.
If we decided to impose single uniform system of regular alphabetic spellings and ignore the origin of words, markers of cultural origin would  be lost.
The spelling system has to cater as best it can for phonetic differences between speakers. If people were encouraged to spell as they spoke, there would be a large number of different written dialects. English spelling has preserved a continuous record of cultural activity by borrowing foreign spelling conventions along with the borrowed words.

Summary Myth 6:   ‘’Women Talk Too Much’’

It is often said that women talk too much and that they talk more than men, but most of the available evidence claims just the opposite.
After lots of researches we can now say that is depends on many different factors, such as the social context in which the talk takes place, the kind of talk involved and the relative social confidence of the speakers, which is affected by their social roles and their familiarity with the topic.
It appears that men talk generally more in formal, public contexts where informative and persuasive talk is highly valued and where talk is generally the prerogative of those with some societal status and has the potential for increasing the status.
Women seem to talk in situations where they feel more socially confident and in a more private situation where talk is more a function of maintaining relations.
Girl-talk in class is often perceived as ‘’showing-off’’, therefore girls have preferred to keep a low profile rather than attract negative attention.
There are cultures where keeping silent is an expression of appreciation or respect, but in western culture talk is very highly valued.

Summary Myth 7:   ‘’Some Languages are Harder than Others’’

Many people speak of languages as easy or difficult to learn but it is hard to explain exactly how and to what extent this is.
The only thing is that learning a language as a foreign language refers to some kind of relative difficulty. For a language learner, the writing system and the orthography are major obstacles.

Languages are not uniformly simple or difficult.
Some languages are closely related linguistically and have existed in close cultural contact for several centuries, therefore some vocabularies have so many similarities in both form and content in the related languages.
Still, the basic standard of learning a language is about grammar, vocabulary and rules of usage, with usage we mean how and when one should speak and rules for using in social situations.
The difficult thing about learning a language is the vocabulary, whether learning one’s native language or learning a foreign language.
It is vocabulary that takes longer to learn than either grammar or the rules of usage, because vocabulary is something we work on as long as we live.

We speak of analytic languages with little or no inflection and derivation and synthetic languages with a large degree of inflection and derivation.
In absolute terms there could be said that analytic languages are easier than synthetic languages that has also to do with the fact that children always learn more analytic version of their native language first.
Typical analytic languages are pidgin languages; a language that arise or develop spontaneously. When pidgin languages become the mother tongue of a group of people we call it then ‘’creole languages’’.
Natural languages are not only used to transfer information from one individual to another but also to indicates and preserves social distinctions.

It is difficult to make the conclusion and say that there really are languages that are easier than others with respect to rules of usage.
Linguists say that there’s no single scale from easy to difficult, and degree of difficulty can be discussed on many levels.
But in the end simplicity in one part of the language may be balanced by complexity in another part.

Summary Myth 8   ‘’Children Can’t Speak Or Write Properly Anymore’’

Through time there have been recurrent complaints about the state of the English language. It’s often said that young people, are liable to misuse the language, or not learn properly.
There has been claimed that traditional ways of teaching, like classroom drills and rote learning of correct spelling and grammar are more effective than the modern teaching methods.
It’s important that educational standards in school should be carefully maintained, there have been no evidence that youngsters of these days are less competent at speaking and writing their native language than the old generation.

In 1850: In England & Wales a lot of brides and bridegrooms could not write their own names in the marriage register.
By 1900 the percentage had declined, because of the Education Act set up in 1870, because the British Government recognized the need for functional literacy.

Back to the present-day complaints, that things were better in the Good Old Days, people assume that there was a Golden age when children were more literate and could write much better than they can now. Research showed that there probably never has been an Golden Age.

Summary Myth 9:   ‘’In the Appalachians They speak like Shakespeare’’

There has been said that in isolated places associated with the Southern mountains in the US, people still use ‘’Elizabethan’’ better known as ‘’Shakespearean’’ speech, the location of the community is never specified.
This is probably one of the hardier cultural beliefs or myths in the collective American psyche.
At one extreme it reflects nothing less than a relatively young nation’s desire for an account of its origins, while at the other extreme the incidental fact that English colonization of North America began during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I four centuries ago. Two things in particular account for its continued vitality: its romanticism and its political usefulness. In the modern mind it’s nothing more than ‘’old-fashioned’’.
The contention that mountaineers talk like Shakespeare cannot withstand because there’s little evidence sited in accounts, the evidence is not persuasive and these accounts mix facts and images, places and times, even immigrant groups from very different parts of the British Isles.
The myth has become obsolete because Shakespeare and Elizabeth lived 400 years ago and the settlers who came to North America during Elizabeth I’s reign either did not survive or did not stay.
Perhaps the most important is that all languages change, even isolated ones and mountain culture has been far from isolated over the past 2 centuries. Mountain speech has far more innovations than hold-overs from the British Isles.
Shakespearian English appeared to be now nothing more than something between nostalgia and a fable.

Summary Myth 10:   ‘’Some Languages Have No Grammar’’

For linguists the grammar of a language is the set of rules which the speakers of the language follow when they speak, this encompasses rules about the possible forms of words.
When a language has no grammar, it would not be possible to make a mistake when speaking a language. It is known that human languages differences are conveyed by some combination of word order, modification of word forms, function-marking participles and intonation.

The fact that some languages don’t have very much grammar than other languages does not mean that a language has no grammar.
You have to consider the kinds of grammatical distinctions such as the differences between actor and the recipient of an action or between statements, questions and commands, there are still many other distinctions which are marked in some languages, but not in others,
Examples like these show that language A may have more complex systems than language B in one area and less complex systems in other areas. We cannot sensibly quantify the amount of grammar a language has. All languages have complex grammatical systems.

It is possible that there are no grammar books for a particular language, but then the rules of a language exist in the heads of the speakers of the language.
When there are no patterns in language, people wouldn’t be able to communicate because they would have no way of knowing what other people meant to say.

All known human languages distinguish at least nouns and verbs. If a language has rules, it has grammar.

Summary Myth 11:   ‘’Italian is Beautiful, German is Ugly’’

Views about the beauty and ugliness of languages and dialects are built on cultural norms, pressures and social connotations.
The social origins of our views about dialects are deeply rooted, emotional grounding for this can be laid down as early three to four years of age.
Research shows that sounds are in the ear of the beholder, to be variably interpreted and socially constructed.
German as a ‘’ugly language’’ has also to do with the accent associated by many with certain members of that nation’s desires for world domination and the atrocities and hardships that attended that move.
So judgments of linguistic beauty are determined in a large part by the larger context in which they are embedded. But still it’s important because speaking in a way that is consensually agreed upon to be unpleasant would lead to some unfavorable social consequences, beauty is dependent on the nature of the context in which the views are being expressed and tied to the fabric of our national and social identities.

Summary Myth 13:   ‘’Black Children are Verbally Deprived’’

In African-American history eloquent orators seem to be abound:
Verbal art is an integral, pervasive and highly valued component of the black culture. The roots of this lie in the justification for the differential power between British and American English .
There is a common unifying theme in the mythology known as the linguistic inferiority principle which assumes that the speech of a socially subordinate group will always be interpreted as inadequate by comparison with the socially dominant group.
There is evidence from listener identification judgments that speakers will be identified with the language of their socialized community, not their racial classification. So when nature is ruled out as possible explanation for the distinctiveness of African-American speech it’s best to take a look at nature: When one group is economically and socially dominant over another, differences will always be interpreted in a way that supports the asymmetrical socio-economic, socio-political and socio-educational status quo. Educational psychologists have maintained that working-class black children do not get adequate verbal stimulation from their caretakers by comparison with their middle-class cohorts and, therefore, they end up language-handicapped.
This is of course not always the fact what important is, is that there are different social interactional models for providing the necessary input for the stimulation of normal language learning.
language deprivation  as a myth of is also supported by mistaken understanding out language patterning, so perhaps a grammaticality myth.

Summary Myth 15:   ‘’TV Makes People Sound the Same’’

By using methods which are now well tested, we can discover the frequency of innovative forms of words.
Of course we know for a certain that language change is as inevitable as the tides.
Many people think that these linguistic changes is because of the television, better known as the mass media which plays a role in the spread of vocabulary items etc.
It seems that television is the primary hypothesis for the motivation of any sound change for everyone.
But if the mass media can be popularize words and expressions, the reasoning goes, then presumably they can also spread other kinds of linguistic changes, but there’s no evidence for this.
The fact that languages changes are spreading at the same historical moment as the globalization of mass media should not be construed as cause and effect. It may be that the media diffuse tolerance toward other accents and dialects. The fact that standard speech reaches dialect enclaves from the mouths of anchorpersons.
Language change itself must be conveyed in face-to-face interactions among peers,
One of the modern changes of even greater social significance than the media explosion is probably the highly mobility.

Summary Myth 17:   ‘’They speak really bad English Down South and in New York City’’

The linguistic myth says that there are varieties of languages which are not as good as other languages.
Linguists believe that regions has their own standard variety, besides the widespread belief in the States that some regional varieties are more standard than others. Looking to NYC and the South this is an example of varieties that are far from the standard and it is even said that in these regions, there’s the most incorrect English spoken.
From all over the States respondents confirm the myth that English is better spoken in other regions, and they do not hesitate to indicate that the South and NYC are on the bottom of the list.
The perception of the way they speak in NYC is: brash, boorish, criminal and better known as the violent New Yorker.
About the South they say that is rural, backward and uneducated. The dialect spoken in the South is associated with the features assigned its residents.
Now the people of New York and the South fight back by making their despised language variety a solidarity symbol, no doubt that they suffer linguistic insecurity in spite of this defensive manner,
The so called standard variety is selected through social processes and has no more logic, historical consistency, communicative expressivity or internal complexity than any other variety.