IT'S ME is informal usage

But, anyway, even if you were posting a descriptive suggestion, I'd argue that "it's me" and "ain't" are hard to compare because "it's me" is used by almost (if not) all native speakers while "ain't" isn't, besides the fact that no matter what "we accept," people will continue to speak as is natural and as they please.

Yes, "ain't" is rather limited to particular dialect groups, whereas "it's me" is basically universal in modern spoken English, one must remember.

How about: "I like (respect, hate etc) you more than her/him/them"
It's ambiguous, isn't it?
Do I like you more than I like sombody else?
Or maybe I like you more than sombody else does?

An interesting thread!

Discussions over words and expressions such as "it's me" and "ain't" do serve to underline just how arbitrary our judgments on language can be. We seem to accept the most subjective statements on language and language "rules" with an uncritical eagerness we would never dream of displaying in other academic disciplines.

Take poor old "ain't" which has been with us for a dog's age and still gets no respect. Meanwhile (as was pointed out), "won't" is cheerfully accepted by everyone. Go figure. Our aversion to "ain't" really boils down to nothing more scientific or rational than:

"We just don't like it."

It's true too that our thinking on English grammar is still held tightly in the death-grip of 18th Century Latin pedantry. You'll note how quickly we have recourse to a passel of terms - e.g., nominative, accusative, gerund, copula - that are important to Latin but pretty damned tenuous when applied to English (for example, we don't actually have an accusative case in English at all).

I believe that one major effect of the Internet, as exemplified by forums like this, is that we are rapidly breaking down the dividers between spoken informal English and the written, formal language.

Before we had email, online chat and forums, only teletype operators and telegraphers ever "conversed" by writing. Writing was a very deliberate process; there was time to compose one's thoughts, draft and redraft.

Now we increasingly write as we speak.

I suggest that's inevitably going to mean a continuing evolution to a more "informal" written language style, hastening the acceptance of things like "who" over "whom," "it's me" and contractions in general.

I prefer "it's me" and "this is her", no matter if it's a casual conversation or a formal paper. I'd never write/say "It's I."

I always write IT IS I/WE/SHE in an essay because our English professor told us to...

Why is GONNA considered ''non-standard''? Even my English professors use it all the time.

Mandy, that's because of a split between the informal spoken and formal written languages, to with respect to North American English, where many things are very often said in the informal spoken language, as primarily the informal spoken language is used in everyday life, even by people like English professors, but are not *written*, as the written language is generally formal, and the formal written language has not accommodated such changes which have occurred in the informal spoken language. There are wholesale grammatical differences, primarily with respect to modal constructions, passive constructions, and pronouns, between the informal spoken language and formal written language, in North American English, as well as large quantities of cliticization in the informal spoken language, which are not reflected in the formal written language, and hence one has to often effectively *translate* between the informal spoken language and the formal written language, in North American English.

Right...I also think it would be pretty safe to say the same about other varieties of English. Not all the same exact processes may be going on but different forms of modal constructions, cliticization, and grammaticalization are occurring or have long been occurring in English varieties around the world which further separate the spoken language norms from the written standard.

Anyway, in reference to the original question about "gonna," which is ["gVn@] for me, it's effectively the future tense in the spoken language (in North America, at least, I know it's commonly used in other areas as well), and sounds much more natural in most cases than "will" and certainly "shall." Unfortunately, many nonnative learners are just taught "will" or "shall," which are fine for the written language, but "gonna" is much better in most cases for the spoken language.

Written, formal-sounding: I will go shopping this weekend.
Spoken, natural-sounding: I'm gonna go shopping this weekend.

Even in relatively formal speeches "gonna" is more and more common, and doesn't really stand out to my ears as excessively informal, but the normal future form as I speak English. There are some exceptions, such as using "will" for emphasis in a few situations. But, overall, "gonna" is a good construction to adopt in speaking English.

Well, one slight nit: at least here, "gonna" seems to have replaced "shall", except when "shall" is used in the negative, interrogative, subjunctive senses, or for strong effect (due to its formality), rather than "will" per se; at least here, in informal speech "will" is still used a lot, albeit usually reduced into a clitic or as "won't", and isn't quite synonymous with "gonna", as "gonna" usually indicates a level of immediacy, that one is /about/ to do something, rather than that someone is going to do something in the general future. And also, "will" is still used here a lot, whereas "shall" is used here far less (even though I myself like to use it time to time for the hell of it, similar to how I sometimes use old-style negative constructions at times because I can).

'gonna' isn't nonstandard; it's a standard pronunciation of the written phrase 'going to.' The error is writing 'gonna' when you mean to write 'going to.' A parallel case: 'have to' is not pronounced the way it is written. Neither is 'Had to have gone'.

GONNA is acceptable in writing as well. You should avoid it in formal writing tho...

Well, I myself try to limit "gonna" and like to informal writing, but then, for me, in informal writing, I basically try to do everything I can to represent my own speech, using modified versions of the current orthography, albeit still non-phonemic ones.

What's the point of writing 'gonna' if 'going to' is
pronounced the same way? There's no point in trying
to make English speech match the English orthography.
At least there _is_ a standard orthography that is mostly
independent of dialect. If every dialect were written with different spellings, reading would become much more difficult than it is.
As it stands, I can read written English written by Indians, or
Brits, or Americans, and they will all be completely clear. The
spoken representations would be extremely different.

Well, when speaking formally, if I encounter "going to" in text, for example, in dialogue, I will actually pronounce it as two separate words, as /"go.IN-tu/ (--> ["goU.wI~:N.tu]), whereas if i'm speaking informally, I of course pronounce them together as a single word, as /"g@n@/ (--> ["g@~.n@]), which I treat grammatically as a single word, not as simply a host plus a clitic. While one may treat the spelling "going to" as being equal to that, it doesn't get the point across sufficiently, and obscures the underlying nature of what is being said, which is a problem in most circumstances where I do use informal writing, as I use informal writing for the specific purposes of actually representing everyday speech in a written form, not for writing things down in a literary format.

For example, if one were to write "should have not" whenever one were to write what is generally indicated informally as "shouldna", that is, /"SUn@/ (--> ["SU~.n@]), it significantly distances what is being written from what would be said. Such is undesirable in informal written contexts, especially because in such contexts, writing such things out in full, as if they were actually meant to be *said* literally as such, that is, as /SUd-h{v-nAt/ (--> [SU:d.h{:v.nA?]), usually is meant to communicate strong emphasis. Of course, that is how I would read "should have not" when speaking formally, likely due to speaking with strong emphasis, even though in contexts when writing is supposed to approximate speech, that communicates a far different tone than "shouldna".

On the other hand, the use of "going to" and "should have not" as such, from a writing conventions standpoint, is just fine in a literary format, except that "going to" breaks the grammatical conventions generally used with respect to modal and auxiliary constructions in literary English, which differ significantly from those used in informal spoken North American English. However, though, one still should expect "going to" to increasingly show up in all writing, due to the overall loss in overall significance of "shall", which is today very formal, to say the least, and unlikely to show up in any medium which is designed to at all approximate actual speech.