standard’ and ‘non-standard’ forms of English

Perhaps the starting point for looking at these questions is way back in 1972, the American linguist William Labov did what became a very famous study into so-called ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’ forms of English. Standard Englishis what is seen as, well, I suppose you could say the ‘educated norm’. It’s the language of formal written English – you know, of newspapers, letters, reports and so on. It’s also, to
some extent, spoken, by what I guess could be described as an ‘educated elite’. Anyway, nonstandard
English is pretty much everything else – the accents, the dialects, the vocabulary thatvary according to where you live, or what social group you’re in. And Labov argued that nonstandard forms were just as expressive and wonderful as standard - they had their own rules and were in no way inferior.

Back to those questions. She don’t care and I don’t want nobody but you are both what
you could call ‘non-standard’ forms. They’re not the sort of things you’d read written in a
newspaper or written in an essay. They’re conversational forms used by some groups of
people in the United States.

It was the pop group The Beatles who sang Ticket to Ride in the early 1960’s and that’s the
song Roberto mentions, but they weren’t American. They were from Liverpool, in North
West England, near where I come from. But when they were writing that song, in the early
1960’s, life in England probably wasn’t much fun and life in the United States - the kind of
things you saw in the movies, in the Hollywood movies - always seemed a bit more
glamorous. This was the country of Elvis Presley, for example, who was big at that time, and
Elvis and friends often used ‘non-standard’ forms in their songs: She don’t; I ain’t; I wanna.
And the Beatles, along with quite a few other British musicians at that time and since then as
well, must have thought that this was pretty cool – so in some of their early songs at least,
they copied this American style even though they were actually British, this form of nonstandard
American English.

Now, I don’t want nobody, which is the other form that’s mentioned in the question… In socalled
‘standard English’ this would be I want nobody or I don’t want anybody. I don’t
want nobody is what we call a ‘double negative’. It’s a non-standard form that’s found in
several types of both British and American English. And the linguist we mentioned, Labov,
did a detailed study of its use in parts of New York, for example. And, it’s something you
may hear in American songs or American movies.