grammaticality - Are double negatives proper English (e.g. "I don't know nothing")?


I have heard many (rather most) people, especially in the USA, saying:



I don't know nothing about it.



Is that correct? I always get a weird feeling hearing this and feel the correct one would be saying:



I don't know anything about it.




Answer



The second one is correct for most dialects of English. The first one is a double negative, or as we call it in linguistics, exhibits negative concord. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on double negatives:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_negative


Most prescriptive grammarians will tell you that a double negative is incorrect because it is "illogical." However, there are many languages that operate just fine using double negative obligatorily. For instance, almost all Romance languages have obligatory negative concord:



  • Italian: Non so niente.

  • French: Je ne sais pas.


Double negatives used to be grammatical in English, but there was a grammatical change sometime during Middle English. The Wikipedia article gives a sentence from a 1644 letter by Oliver Cromwell (emphasis is added by me).



A little after, he said one thing lay upon his spirit. I asked him what it was. He told me it was that God had not suffered him to be no more the executioner of His enemies.



The double negative is still used in many modern dialects, but it is typically very stigmatized.


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