Dr Emma Humphries
Early Career Fellowship, School of Arts, English and Languages
TEDx Talk Title - 'How Sabrina Carpenter is ‘saving’ the English language'
What can a pop song teach us about grammar? On her latest album, Sabrina Carpenter calls out a potential lover for his ‘bad’ grammar; a witty jab that speaks to a larger story: society’s long-standing fixation on what counts as ‘correct’ English. This ideology, known as linguistic prescriptivism, divides language into ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, and is everywhere. We see it not just in dictionaries and within classrooms, but also in the films we watch, the podcasts we stream, the fiction we read and, yes, even in the lyrics we sing along to.
Drawing on examples from across popular culture, I will explore how prescriptivism is framed and spread in ways that feel natural, entertaining, and even funny. But beneath the humour lies something serious: these judgements can reinforce inequality and fuel exclusion. By exposing the myths behind ‘good’ language, I will invite my audience to rethink their assumptions about language and correctness.
About the Speaker
I finished my PhD in French in 2021 with a COVID viva on the day that Joe Biden became the US President. Since then, I have had research and teaching positions at the University of Birmingham, the University of Cambridge, Cardiff University and at Queen’s University Belfast. I’m back for a second stint at Queen’s as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow.
I am interested in how we judge the way people speak, write and sign. From casual comments about “good grammar” to accent-based assumptions about intelligence or class, language attitudes reveal powerful social biases. My research, which sits between Sociolinguistics and French Studies, explores these attitudes and the ideologies that underpin them. Often so entrenched that we rarely stop to question them, these beliefs have real consequences: limiting social mobility, narrowing opportunity, and reinforcing inequality for those whose language use does not fit a so-called “correct” standard. Raising awareness of these barriers is a necessary step to bringing them down. I really enjoy engaging with people on a subject they feel they already know inside out, their own language, and then showing how many of our ideas about what is “correct” or “incorrect” are a patchwork of historical happenstance, shifting opinions, and social judgements.
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