It needs cleaned…

[GooseberryBeret]

Anyone else keep noticing this on here? Not ‘it needs to be cleaned’ or ‘it needs cleaning’ but ‘it needs cleaned’. Or ‘it needs done’, or whatever.
Is it a regional thing I wasn’t aware of or just a grammar fail?

Yes! Apparently it’s a Scottish turn of phrase

Quite common in Scotland. I'll hear needs done as often as needs doing.

Just a point as I see a lot of these sort of threads; I'm a linguist (as in I work in academia etc.) and all of these threads are very prescriptivist in nature (where people say what they think something should be). Linguistics nowadays is all about descriptivism - we describe what is, and do not pass judgement on whether something is 'correct' because there isn't one single standard.
English as it is today comes from five (some older linguists would argue four) different varieties of a language whose differences still exist today in our dialects.

It’s regional (though I’m not from the UK, and not entirely sure which region). It doesn’t bother me, actually.

I worked in the US for an American boss (from the Midwest) and he said this type of thing regularly. It did bother me a bit but I got used to it!

Yup, definitely a Scottish thing

My DH would say this. From NI.

As others have said, it’s common in Scotland.

I like the fact that we have all these differences of wording and use between the UK dialects. It makes our language so much more interesting!

Thanks all, interesting to know.

The voice in my head turns Scouse when I read posts such as your example.

So suppose I conjugate one of the past tenses of the verb 'to be' and say

I was we were
you were you were
he/she/it was they were,

because I have been taught those through learning other languages, and I think they are correct. If I hear someone say "we was...", which is quite often where I live, am I to tell myself that 'we was' is correct?

Consider 'we rung', 'we have rung', 'we have rang', 'we rang', 'we began', 'we have began', we begun', 'we have begun'. Isn't anything at all 'standard'?

I do understand that I am typing about verbs, which are not same things, I suppose, as 'it needs cleaned' compared to 'it needs to be cleaned'.

I pride myself on having very good grammar but as a Scottish person i would say something needs done without a second thought.

@QwestSprout how does that fit in with learning grammar? If English is now descriptivist are there are no right or wrong answers any more? That seems to defeat the purpose of a language being built on a structure. It's a genuine question as I have a degree in English from yonks ago when grammar was prescriptive. Also, does this apply to all languages?

My head's in a spin! I thought all those grammatical errors in the newspapers were just that, and not a modern development of the English language. Is this reflected in GCSE and Scottish National exams?

Or am I failing to understand???? Gad!

Its also an Irish thing, lots of my Irish friends say this.

Which brings me to different. I've been taught that something differs from something else, so it's not 'different than' or 'different to' but different from.
?????

@upinaballoon
Yes, basically.
One that comes up a lot online for example is:
I asked vs. I aksed
The first is standard (saying something is standard is fine, saying it's correct and is the only true option isn't), the second is found in some dialects. But both are correct because one comes from the verb ascian and one from the verb axian. In Old English aks was used in the southern areas and ask was used in the northern areas. The fact one became the standard doesn't mean the other shouldn't still be used. Just as one example.

To go back to your was/were example, some regions didn't have the same progression with the verb to be as others, so for them we was is/was correct. It's just non standard because at some point we decided to codify our multiple versions into one and state that 'this version is the one we shall state as 'correct''.

Learning grammar - well. That's a very complicated question and answer tbh and to a fair extent depends on whether we're talking about learning in the sense of your acquisition of language (what you actually speak), or in an academic sense and then to what level. At Nat 5/Higher (or GCSE/A level) I wouldn't expect anything other than standard English and Scots to be taught, and I don't expect that to change any time soon really. The exam boards occasionally go through phases of setting texts in dialects but I'm not involved with that, I don't teach children.

English is still very much built on structures, it's just we take sentences and break them down into what they are - using something called syntax trees/grammar trees that look more like code than language - not what we think they should be.

It does not apply to all languages, l'academie francaise are notorious for insisting on Master's level study still teaching prescriptivism. It has led to interesting academic conversations!

As with anything of any weight at all, it's complex.

All languages have grammar. All of them, even the whistling language of Gomera. And the rules of grammar are an attempt to describe how a language's grammar works. They're descriptive, not prescriptive. In the same way, the laws of physics are an attempt to describe the way physical objects and energy behave. An apple, when dropped, doesn't think "oh the laws of physics say I have to accelerate at the rate of 10 metres per second per second" it just falls. Isaacs Newton described its fall in his laws of physics.

Language is resistant to laws and rules because it is constantly changing. Words mean one thing now, and a completely different thing 30 years later. Some words mean two opposite things at the same time. Aside from vocabulary, usage and structure change too. Some people are resistant to that change and others welcome it. There isn't a right and wrong - there's just convention. We all adhere to convention to one degree or another (that's what a convention is), but we can no more stop the evolution of language than Canute could turn back the tide.

I love grammar and pedantry, but I don't get too het up about people saying something wrong different

I love grammar, knowing/learning the origins of words (where studying Latin at school helps) and pedantry. I do know about syntax/grammar trees because when I first came across them, I looked up the examples and realised they were just new names/descriptors for what I had previously learned.

That reminds me of a conversation my mum had at work. Mum said it's correct to say different from, not different to. Someone replied that different to can be correct, if you're meaning "different also", so mum pointed out that in that case, it would be different too 😉.