Linguistic descriptivism
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Linguistic descriptivism is an approach many grammarians take towards the grammars of various languages where an overall description of the language is used to decide what is correct usage. Non-standard and colloquial manners of speech and grammar are considered just that — non-standard — and not necessarily "incorrect," although oddities that are clearly not colloquialisms are considered to be wrong.
Descriptivism is thus considered the opposite of prescriptivism, which says that there are certain unbreakable rules in languages and that anything that violates these rules is incorrect.
[edit] Opposition and controversy
Descriptive grammar is a somewhat controversial topic. Many opponents feel that it is too open-ended because there are no clear borders between what is considered correct usage, what is considered non-standard, and what is considered incorrect. Many prescriptivists have argued that under this theory of grammar even if just one person speaks "incorrectly," it would still be considered "correct" by descriptivists if that person were to do so consistently. Descriptivists have of course responded to remarks like this by saying that a single person is obviously not a big enough cross-section of a population to call linguistic quirks unique to that individual correct, but they do have a lot more trouble defining when a group is big enough.
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