Why do so many people say "seen" when they mean "saw"?

Actually, "I seen" is an old dialectal variant, just as logical an irregular past tense (perhaps even more so!) as "saw" when you analyze it. It just happens that "saw" was the form the "won out" in the dominant dialects of the language, but "seen" has not been completely overthrown.

Note the following discussion:

"What’s going on is clearly not ignorance, laziness or poor schooling. The pattern of present, past and perfect of see, seen and seen in place of see, saw and seen reveals that speakers don’t put irregular verbs together just by combining a stem and a suffix, the way they form many thousands of English regular verbs. Among the roughly 180 ‘approved’ irregular verbs now listed in grammars of American English, there is no verb with an -en suffix in the past as well as the perfect form.

"So where does I seen it come from? It follows a more general pattern implicit in all the regular verbs and in many irregular ones as well. All of the regular verbs, such as need, needed,, and about 75 of the irregular ones, such as lead, led, led, have the same form in the past and present perfect, but a different form in the present. The see, seen, seen formation fits this more inclusive pattern, which can be stated as present differs from past and perfect; the past is like the perfect minus 'have.' "

http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/correct/gatekeepin...

I think many people say "I seen" knowing full well it's incorrect. They feel if they aren't held accountable for this then they won't be expected to be held accountable for other grammatical errors. Naturally they wouldn't want their peers to think of them as iggnernt (sic).

well, if they are saying, "i've seen that before" then that's actually correct. do you mean when someone uses saw in present tense like, "did you saw that?" then yes, this usage would be wrong, though it'll take a lot more than grammatical errors to peeve me.

Saw is past tense but seen is past participle. People rarely use past tent when describing about their own experiences. They mostly like to use past participle coz it will make the listener didn’t think the way they didn’t meant to say.

Americans have corrupted the proper English grammar with all its slangs and lazy practices. My pet peeves includes:

presently -- current

farther -- further

adverb should follow verb (but not in America)

They do so because they don't mind sounding like complete idiots.

I feel the same way. My guess is that they were daydreaming or asleep during the lesson on how to conjugate. They're lazy, they don't feel speaking correct English is important; but what they don't realize is how ignorant it makes them look in the world.

There's a grammatical propriety that drives me nuts. I will never say, "I would have liked to have seen it." A double past participle makes the sentence too cumbersome. To me it makes much better sense to say either, "I would have liked to see it," or, "I would like to have seen it."

That is one that also bugs me !!!!

Can't think of any more right now... but "seen" reminds me of a conversation I overheard one time, and, to me it was hilarious.

One kid says, "Seen your brother the other day."

Other kid says, "So? I seen him, too."

What a couple of morons. LOL.

Yep, I hate the "I seen it!" one. I also dislike many others mentioned here, but how about those who say "hisself" instead of "himself"? "Hisself" is not a word!!!!