Usage question: "I hadn't drank any coffee before I lived in Italy."

Ok, so as an English teacher, I know that in the present and past perfect tenses, the auxiliary verb have is followed by the past participle form of the verb.

Using most verbs, I find that this is true for all sentences I have heard. However, on several instances, I have run into a native speaker using the past form of the verb (drank) where the grammar calls for the past participle (drunk).

For example: "I hadn't drank any coffee before I lived in Italy."

According to grammar norms, this sentence should be: "I hadn't drunk any coffee..."

More and more, I noticed that people tend to use drank instead of drunk after perfect aspect constructions. This construction was used across all communities of practice and wasn't subject to dialect boundaries.

According to results from http://www.phras.in, have drank and have drunk are clear, with the standard have drunk being 4x more prevalent than have drank. However, with an instance rate of about 200,000 for the non-standard form, that is nothing to scoff at. However, the opposite was true with the negative form haven't drank vs. haven't drunk with the non-standard being almost twice as prevalent.

EDIT: As for the dialect variant idea, I have researched into the various dialectal changes involving the past participle. Most constructions involving the variant are indicated to be dialectal or just plain bad grammar. However, when I started hearing it from people from the UK, this is when I started asking questions. Looking into it further, I have found some linguistic research papers involving corpora and frequency analyses of this phenomena and have found that there is definitely a shift among non-standard verbs to use the past instead of the participle for perfect aspect. At least according to the BNC and COCA. This is usually with germanic-root words such as bid/bade/bid, drink/drank/drunk, bit/bit/bitten.

Research Paper: I haven't drank in weeks

Another Example

So, my question, then, is whether or not there is some sort of construction that is the exception for this particular situation, i.e. some construction where perfect tense does not use past participle after the aux. verb, or if this is simply some crazy, non-standard phenomenon with the verb drink in the perfect tense.

Solution 1:

My guess is, this is part of a general conflation of past tense and past participles for ablauting verbs. Where I grew up (Sydney, Australia), the past participle is often used for the simple tense (I drunk the coffee, rung the captain, then sunk the boat). This only happens with participles that lack overt suffixes (so, it's impossible with worn or seen). The phenomenon you've spotted looks like the flip side of this conflation, with the simple past filling in for the past participle. Very nice if you're a grammar watcher.

Solution 2:

The use of "have drank" instead of "have drunk" was widespread 150 years ago. Consider the following Google Ngram:

This does not happen for most irregular verbs, as you can see for the corresponding Ngram for "have sank/have sunk". So 150 years ago, "have drank" was not incorrect grammar.

As to why people still use it nowadays, there are two possibilities. Either they learned English from people who never switched away from the use of "drank" as the past participle, or they are just confused about when to use the past and when the past participle. I would guess that it's often the former.

I have seen speculation that "have drank" was used to avoid saying the word "drunk", one of whose meanings is a synonym for "intoxicated". (In the comments here, for example.) I don't know if there any solid evidence for this speculation; it is reportedly mentioned in the OED, although I can't check this myself.

Solution 3:

According to English grammar, when you want to form a Past Perfect you must use the subject plus the past simple of the auxiliary verb have plus the past participle of the main verb. Although this is the only correct construction of the past participle, there are a lot of dialects that prefer to use the past form of a verb instead of the past participle.

If you want to write correctly use the past participle!