Your mom is a nice person, isn't she?
Your friends are still at school, aren't they?
Now write the tags for the following:
1. The weather is nice today, ______________?
2. You are my friend, _______________?
3. I am terribly groovy, ______________?
Notice that you can turn the tags into statements: she isn't, they aren't, etc... Now reverse the three you wrote. It isn't, you aren't, I aren't...I aren't???
"Ain't" was the traditional contraction of "am not" for most of the history of the English language. In the last couple hundred years, it became associated with less prestigious, lower-class speech. Hence, it was avoided. We do not contract "am not", but rather contract "I am", as in "I'm not". Unfortunately, this does not work in tag questions because the pronouns follow the verb--"isn't she", etc... Alas look what the banishment of ain't has brought! So is "aren't I" ungrammatical or grammatical? What would a Traditionalist say?
Thankfully, this prescriptive view of grammar began to change at the beginning of the 20th Century. There were three primary reasons for the change. The first was a man named Ferdinand de Saussure.
Saussure, a Genevan linguist and philologist, was interested in language as a total system, both spoken and written. His best known work, "Course in General Linguistics," was published posthumously in 1916, and was actually not 'written' by him. He was lecturing at the University of Paris, and his students realized how revolutionary his ideas were. When he died, his students compiled their lecture notes into this work and published it. Saussure was the first to distinguish between an internal language competence and external language performance. Further, he was the first to split language study into diachronic (language history over time) and synchronic (language in the present) spheres. Given that he was interested in how people actually spoke, he had little interest in the prescriptive rules of Traditional Grammar. His students seized on this, and quickly, so did most linguists.
The second change in the view of language came from missionaries. The nineteenth century saw an explosion of missionaries leaving their homes to go to remote regions around the world. They found themselves in communities speaking strange languages, strange relative to the European languages of the missionaries! One of their first projects was to write grammars of these new languages. Well, given the "Traditional" tradition of grammar, their first model was Latin, and while English could be forced into the Latin model, these languages could not. So the missionaries, without a model, simply described the languages. This descriptive approach to grammar is still used by linguists today.
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