We Don’t Need No Education: How Standard English fell out of love with double negatives

A double negative occurs when two forms of negation are used in the same sentence. A form of negation is a word such as ‘no’, ‘not’, ‘none’, ‘nobody’ or ‘never’. In Standard English, two forms of negation in one sentence are considered to cancel each other out. Hence, if we were to say that someone was ‘not incompetent’, we would probably mean that the person in question is relatively competent, though this sounds to me like a backhanded compliment.

Saying ‘we don’t need no education’ should therefore be equivalent to ‘we do need some education’ but in many English dialects, the second form of negation in a sentence actually intensifies the first one. Using double negatives in this way is a very common dialect feature in English, but it is strongly stigmatised. Writers of grammar manuals and opinion columns will commonly claim that the use of double negatives for this purpose is illogical; two negatives should cancel each other out, not intensify each other. And for Standard English, this is certainly true.

The example of ‘not unkind’ that I gave in the first paragraph is the only type of double negative that is ever used in Standard English; the negative particle ‘not’ followed by a negative adjective beginning with un-. It's simply not natural in Standard English to say ‘I don't need nothing’ and actually mean ‘I do need something’.

Unlike Standard English, various languages do allow double negatives, where the negative effect is intensified rather than cancelled out. Languages where multiple negatives intensify each other are said to have negative concord. Portuguese, Spanish, Persian, Russian, Serbian, Afrikaans, Latvian and Greek all have negative concord.

Consider this example from Serbian:

Niko      nikada    nigde   ništa   nije   uradio

For the benefit of those of you who don't speak Serbian (there's always someone!), the above sentence literally means ‘nobody never did not do nothing nowhere’.

In Standard English we would say ‘nobody has ever done anything anywhere’, but the (perfectly grammatical) Serbian equivalent has no less than five negative words in one sentence.

Are we to claim that Serbian and all other languages that have negative concord are illogical because they use multiple negatives to intensify the meaning?

Even in English, double negatives haven’t always been stigmatised. In Old and Middle English, double, triple and even quadruple negatives were common. Instead of cancelling each other out, two or more negatives intensified each other. Just like in the modern day dialects that have double negatives, if you were to say ‘I didn’t do nothing’, you would be affirming that you really didn’t do anything! 

In Old English, double negatives were particularly common in the West Saxon dialect, spoken in the West and South of Britain. When a speaker of West Saxon used a negative word such as næfre (never) or nænig (not any), they knew that they had to add another negative word in the sentence to agree with it. So they put the word ne (meaning ‘not’) before the verb. Consider this example:

He     nowiht      to   gymeleste     ne       forlet

‘He    nothing      to      neglect       not     allowed’

A more natural translation would be 'he allowed nothing to be neglected.'

This type of multiple negation survived into Middle English. However, in the transition from the Middle English to the Modern English period, the double negative in written English gradually disappeared. This is an example of grammatical change, which happens to all living languages over time. The double negative was almost gone by Shakespeare's time (Early Modern English), although it does show up occasionally in his plays. In ‘As You Like It,’ for example, Celia complains, "I cannot go no further."

But beginning in the 1700s, language purists condemned the double negative, considering it illogical and improper in English. This idea was probably strengthened by the fact that Latin, the language of nobility whose beauty English could only hope to mimic, did not use double negatives. The prescription against double negatives proved to be the final nail in the coffin for this feature in Standard English, although it is of course alive and well in Cockney, African-American Vernacular English and a whole host of regional dialects across the English-speaking world.

Considering how long they have been part of the English language, double negatives are not a corruption of Standard English. Neither are they inherently illogical. Languages don’t always make perfect logical sense!

I am not suggesting we should disregard the rules of Standard English and slip double negatives into formal emails, interviews or academic articles. Although double negatives are widely understood to intensify each other, the truth is that there is still a strong association between the use of double negatives and poor education. I don’t suggest we should try to bring double negatives back into Standard English. But maybe one day they will return. Maybe they won’t. We just don’t know what the English language will be like in the future.