John Frame:
In natural languages, there are many variations in grammar, style, and accent. Grammarians tend to elevate one group of variations as a standard. So the predominant speech in Berlin is considered to be “good German.” The predominant speech of Amsterdam is “good Dutch,” and so on. There may be some value in this as a means of encouraging uniformity of language in public writing and speech. But it is somewhat arbitrary. We need to remember that it comes from human grammarians, not from divine revelation. No divine norm requires us to speak in what grammarians may describe as “good” language. God never tells us to speak the language of the academic elite, or to disparage variations from that language as “errors.”
—Doctrine of the Word of God
John McWhorter:
The very idea that grammatical “mistakes” eternally tempt the unwary is the spawn of three illusions that seduced these bewigged martinets.… The second was that when a grammar changes, it must be decaying rather than just, say, changing. So we were taught to lasso and hold on to whom, though at the time it was fading from English just like all the other words and constructions that differentiated Modern English from Old English—a foreign tongue to us that none of us feel deprived not speaking. (15–16)
Important: my argument is not that people need not be taught standard English in school; they do and likely always will. My point is more specific: the casual speech constructions that we use alongside standard English, that we are taught, are illogical; wrong, and mistakes, are in reality just alternates that happen not to have been granted social cachet. (17)
—Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care
Note: John and John (and I) are not saying that people should flout the social conventions we call “Standard American English” (or the ones we call “Standard Malay” or the ones we call “Standard Urdu”), anymore than we’d instruct kids to put their elbows on the table or men to wear hats at a nice restaurant. We’re only saying that Standard English is a convention, not a delivery from on high—and that that realization will change the way we think and talk about language. The kind of person who purposefully flouts any of the conventions I’ve just named is perhaps rightly (I’d have to know the full circumstances) considered gauche. But the person who never learned the conventions is not thereby proven to be morally deficient. And—and this is the real key—the conventions can and will change over time, and (especially in language) such change is not necessarily a sign of degradation, just difference.