But even with face-to-face contact, the young learner sets the agenda. Clear, varied utterances directly addressed to the youngster are the silken strands out of which the child builds the language web. Caregiver speech is extra-useful when the same words come in more than once in different ways. Many parents do this naturally: 'Now Patsy, where did you get that knife? Give the knife to mummy. Give mummy the knife. There's a good girl.'

	Thinking Points
	Does language serve a different purpose in childhood than it does in adult life, or is children's language simply a stage in development towards maturity? Is language always about communication between individuals, or is it possible that a child could develop a language unknown to anybody except him- or herself?

The talk has to grab the child's attention. Joint enterprises are all important. Research published around ten years ago showed that parents found it easier to talk to girls, mainly because they involved them more often in domestic chores: 'Come and help mummy with the potatoes', mothers tended to say to their daughters. But 'Go outside and play football', they commanded their sons. Not surprisingly, some families ended up with chattering potato-peeling girls, and tongue-tied football-kicking boys. This was one reason why girls were often a step ahead of boys in their language, it was suggested. Hopefully, this imbalance is being corrected, with both sexes now equally involved in chores, and perhaps equally acquiring language.

But if people talk to them, all children respond well. They enjoy pit-patting the conversational ball backwards and forwards. 'Put on your coat', said father. 'Why?' asked junior. 'Because we're going out.' 'Why?' 'Because we're going to buy some dinner.' 'Why?' 'Because we have to eat.' 'Why?' At this point, father realized junior was not interested in the answers, but was treating the conversation as a game, which he wanted his father to go on playing.

So children build the language web by extracting what they need from the talk they hear around them. Most are efficient chatterers long before they go to school. But they still need to learn which type of speech to use when--so-called 'communicative competence'. In linguistic terminology, different registers suit different occasions. Babies and bank managers must be addressed in different ways, just as different clothes are required for the beach and a wedding. A doctor speaking to another doctor might talk about a circumorbital haematoma, but to a schoolboy, it would be a black eye.

The language web, then, has been mostly acquired by children by around the age of thirteen, apart from the mixing and matching of language styles, and also vocabulary.

You might expect parents to cheer as their offspring become competent language users, and give them, say, a reward of a telephone on their thirteenth birthday. But the acquisition story is not yet over. At this age, language suddenly becomes a mudslinging match between generations. Teenagers want to talk like their pals, but parents disapprove. A father was shocked when his daughter informed him that she did not dare talk in her 'posh' home voice at school; she would lose her friends.

Teenage stroppiness is partly to blame, with predictable kicks at convention--though this is normally a temporary phase. Teenagers' language usually gets less extreme as they approach adult life.

But changing speech styles also tangle people up. These days, formal speech, like a top hat, is used on fewer occasions. Informal speech, like an open-necked shirt, is felt to be friendlier. In this easy-going atmosphere, being 'proper' is often regarded as less important than being 'matey'.

Matiness and casualness are sometimes emphasized by swearing. Swearwords swarm like bees in some recent literature, and buzz about freely in conversation. Yet today's swearwords are undergoing a bleaching process, a fading of meaning that happens in all semantic change. In the last century, oaths using the name of God were widely disapproved of. Then they gradually lost their power to shock. These days, f-words (sexual swearing) and s-words (excrement-swearing) no longer horrify so many people. Their meaning has weakened as the original connection with sex and excrement fades.

But the war of words between the generations is also entwined with the usual cobweb of worries which surround language change. Parents want their offspring to use so-called Standard English. What exactly they mean by this is a question which has long ensnared people in its sticky and dusty threads. The word 'standard' is ambiguous: it can mean either a value which has to be met, as in 'a high standard', or it can mean uniform practice, as in 'standard behaviour'.

These two meanings of standard have long been confused. For example, in 1836, a treatise which offered 'principles of Remedy for Defects of Utterance', commented that 'the common standard dialect is that in which all marks of a particular place of birth and residence are lost and nothing appears to indicate any other habits of intercourse than with the well-bred and well-informed, wherever they may be found'.

So Standard English came to be thought of as the speech of the educated. This was often assumed to be the language of Oxford, so-called Oxford English, and of the most expensive fee-paying schools (known in England as 'public schools'). So the word 'standard' moved from meaning general usage to that of a specific group to be emulated.

But it's important to distinguish between accent, which describes pronunciation, and dialect, which involves grammar. Spoken Standard English is not an accent--as pointed out in a recent survey commissioned by the National Curriculum Council (a body which sets up school curricula in Great Britain). Pronunciation has always varied, and Standard English includes a variety of accents. Different accents are a sign of identity, a badge of one's area. They are a problem only if they are hard to understand. Meanwhile, the grammar of English is fairly similar across the British Isles. Standard spoken English is usually defined as the grammatical forms used in formal public contexts, and they do not vary very much.

But language is always changing, and a few fluctuating forms cause a disproportionate amount of anxiety. The phrase for you and I, in place of the presumed 'correct' form, for you and me, came out top of the complaints in letters written to the BBC about language. Yet several well-known figures have used it in public quite recently, including Oxford-educated Lady Thatcher, who commented that 'It's not for you and I to condemn the state of the Malawi economy.' A surprising mismatch exists between what people condemn and the condemned forms they use without noticing. Perhaps the next generation will shake itself free of this cobweb of pseudo-worries.

The language web, like a spider's web, is woven in a preordained way. As with spiders, time and effort have to go into the weaving process. But humans, unlike spiders, can think about the webs they have woven. This sometimes gives rise to a superfluous cobweb of worries. Ideally, the final layers of a child's web-building would be supplemented by two extra, conscious strands: tolerance of minor variations and an interest in each other's speech.

In Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, first performed in 1916, the character Henry Higgins refers to the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle as a 'squashed cabbage leaf, complaining that 'a woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere, no right to live'. This narrow-minded view is luckily disappearing. Increasingly, people are beginning to realize that variety is the spice of linguistic life.