1. Introduction
This book addresses a crucial, yet often overlooked dimension of minority language standardisation, namely, how social actors engage with, support, alter, resist and even reject standardisation processes. We look at standardisation processes as a political domain where social actors use standards as semiotic resources for articulating discourses on society. The chapters in this volume are therefore concerned first and foremost with social actors, their ideologies and practices, rather than with language per se. By considering the perspectives and actions of people who participate in or are affected by minority language politics, this volume aims to provide a comparative and nuanced analysis of the complexity and tensions inherent in minority language standardisation processes. Echoing Fasold (1984), this involves a shift in focus from a sociolinguistics of language to a sociolinguistics of people.
Comparatively little work exists on how individuals engage with stan-dardisation and language standards in minority or minoritised contexts. In this introduction, we provide an overview of ongoing debates about stan-dardisation processes, highlighting how social actors involved in these processes often find themselves at odds with conflicting priorities. On the one hand, standardisation remains a potent way of doing or inventing language, of producing languages as bounded, discrete entities and as social institutions and subsequently increasing the social status of those who use them. On the other hand, standardisation is inherently a limitation of diversity (Milroy and Milroy 1999) and a way to harness and act upon linguistic, that is to say, social differences. Promoting language standards is thus both a way for validating groups and for limiting group-internal diversity. Considering that diversity is often the very raison dâĂȘtre for minority language movements based on the claims that all ways of communicating are equally legitimate and that language diversity needs to be protected, this trade-off is at best contentious and at worst a Faustian bargain. Language advocates, and in some cases state or regional authorities, often view standards as emancipatory and empowering, a way to promote education and other forms of civic communication through mother tongues and ensure better chances of equal achievement for minority groups. Yet, such processes require selecting particular forms over others; they generate and legitimise certain varieties of writing or speaking, as well as the structures and institutions that sustain their diffusion. This potentially establishes linguistic standards that speakers themselves cannot meet, together with new hierarchies that give advantage to some speakers over others. Consequently, minority language speakers are potentially faced with a double stigma (Gal 2006): their language continues to hold lower prestige and to fall short when measured against official national languages, and they may also be considered inadequate when measured against the standardised version of the minority language. Paradoxically, standards for minority languages may come to be perceived by social actors as lacking both the authority and anonymity of a national language as well as the authenticity or the capacity to index locality often ascribed to minority languages (Woolard 2008).
How do social actors experience and negotiate these predicaments? Why are standards for minoritised languages sometimes sought after and praised and at other times vehemently contested and rejected? What are the consequences of standardisation projects for different people? It is these questions that this volume considers through case studies of minority language standardisation from around the world. The authors, who come from very different backgrounds with respect to involvement in standardisation processes, draw on ethnographic, historical and discourse data in order to examine standardisation projects in diverse settings. In bringing these case studies and analyses together, we aim to provide both empirical and conceptual insights into minority language standardisation. This volume highlights the role of social actors in the creation and negotiation of standards, and the diversity of marginalised or peripheral speech communities in which standardisation efforts occur. Focusing on ground-level processes and participants allows us to illuminate ways in which projects to stan-dardise minoritised languages echo, reinvent, and at times subvert the characteristics of language standardisation established since the 18th century. Beginning with a reflection on language standardisation from a historical perspective (section 2), we then define our focus on minority/minoritised language communities and discuss the nature of standardisation projects in these settings in particular (section 3). We conclude with an overview of the volume (section 4).
2. On the Importance of Standardising Language
Language standards have become naturalised and widely accepted as the normal forms of dominant European languages. Processes akin to stan-dardisation have existed in Europe and elsewhere in the world since at least the advent of literary language in Ancient Greece (see Colvin 2009). Koines, norms, standards, literary languages and the advent of grammatisation (Auroux 1995) all correspond to attempts at harnessing language use and imposing particular views on speech. In this section, we wish to unravel some of the threads that lead to standardisation, and argue that modern processes of standardisation since the 18th century differ markedly from previous processes. While standards are closely related to other collective projects, we suggest that the standardisation processes which have been occurring in the 20th and 21st centuries have roots which can be traced to a particular place and a particular moment in time: the onset of the modern era in Europe and in its early colonies in the Americas. Current standardisation projects, from this perspective, are descended from the 17th and 18th century philosophical projects which aimed at decontextualising language and at instituting a democratic, universally accessible public space.
2.1 Defining Standardisation
First, let us start with a broad definition of standardisation. Following Charles Ferguson (1996 [1988], 189),
standardisation is the process of one variety of a language becoming widely accepted throughout the speech community as a supradialectal normâthe âbestâ form of the languageârated above regional and social dialects, although these may be felt to be appropriate in some domains.
This definition equates the standard form of a language with a linguistic norm, an accepted set of rules among a group of people who may view themselves as belonging to a unified language communityâsomething which exists and has existed in every speech community (see, for example, Bloomfield 1927). This, Ferguson continues, links standardisation with language spread and is associated with three tendencies: koineisation (âthe reduction of dialect differencesâ), variety shifting (the association of a groupâs acts of identity with the supradialectal norm) and classicisation (âthe adoption of features considered to belong to an earlier prestige normâ) (Ferguson 1996). From this perspective, a wealth of historical processes could be subsumed under the label of standardisation, and only the intensification of such collective undertakings would mark recent centuries as different from previous eras. While the term âStandard languageâ has been dated to the 18th and 19th centuries (Crowley 2003), standardisation could be seen as a form of institutionalisation, i.e. the establishment of a norm by a source of power, to serve wider diffusion of ideas or government. A broad definition of standards, such as the one above, could include Koines in classical Greece, as well as the forms of Greek devised for teaching the language in Egypt and Rome for instance. Chancery languages in the Late Middle Ages, in what was to become the Netherlands, in England, or in France, can similarly be viewed as precursors to standard languages (Burke 2004; Lodge 1993). Literary languages also bear much resemblance to what we call standards, and attempts at creating prestigious literary varieties can be traced to Dante in Italy, Chaucer in England, Henrysoun in Scotland, the PlĂ©iade in France or the Languedoc and Provence vernacular literary revivals in the 17th century, as well as other literary movements in Europe, Asia or the Americas. Translations of the Bible into German (1522), Dutch (1526), English (1526 for Tyndaleâs edition) or, later, Welsh (1588) and other minoritised languages1 may also be included under this label. Finally, grammatisation, the movement to produce dictionaries and grammars for European vernaculars on the model of Greek and Latin initiated during the Renaissance (Auroux 1995), also bears much resemblance to processes of standardisation, as do the various projects of orthographic regularisation which became common in Europe and elsewhere after the 17th century.
Yet, if the term âstandardisationâ can be used to describe all such trends, how useful is it compared to other notions such as âlinguistic normsâ or âliterary languageâ? How then to capture the unique developments linked with the promotion of writing in the vernaculars after the Renaissance, the rise of nation-states and colonial and postcolonial language policy? Is the Standard French of the AcadĂ©mie Française, for example, a social construct that differs markedly from Koineised Greek, and if so, how? This book adopts the point of view that standardisation is different in nature from these previous language-related projects. We argue that standardisation constitutes an outcome as well as one of the main defining features of modernity, beginning between the 17th and the 18th centuries in Europe. Social actors who participate in the standard language regimes of contemporary nation-states are engaging in a social project that is distinct from earlier projects in both its focus and its reach, as examined below.
2.2 Standardisation as Decontextualisation: A Historical Perspective
From our perspective, standard languages are the product of three intersecting processes. First, the philosophical project of modernity paved the way for the dominance of standards by associating correct forms of language with decontextualised, apparently neutral and indexical-free forms of language (see Gal 2006, this volume). Second, standardisation matured hand-in-hand with the subsequent formation of nation-states, which developed standards for particular political projects involving the creation of an apparently neutral public sphere and the reproduction of behavioural norms within that sphere. Third, colonisation exported this philosophical and political model worldwide and created a need for teachable forms of European languages.
Modernity is a historical period with origins in the early 17th century. Understood as a period of radical transformations, philosophically, scientifically and politically, and broadly defined by the quest for certainty in knowledge, modernity can be understood as Europeâs response to 30 years of religious wars after the division of Christendom between Catholics and Protestants (Greengrass 2014). Politically, modernity is closely connected with the outcome of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), a series of treaties which marked the end of hostilities, the long-term weakening of the Holy Roman Empire (contemporary Germany) and the rise of nation-states as the system that would ensure stability on the continent (Toulmin 1990).
Language standards were not explicitly crafted at this particular time, however. Rather, language standardisation derives from a scientific, taxonomic project which held that in order to achieve certain, definitive knowledge, âa unique, decontextualised view of nature must be developedâ (Slaughter 1982, 85). In linguistic terms, this translated into a deep distrust of language (Bauman and Briggs 2003) and into projects to invent radically decontextualised and supposedly universal languages (Slaughter 1982). In the words of historian Stephen Toulmin, âone aim of 17th-century philosophers was to frame all their questions in terms that rendered them independent of contextâ (1990, 21). The changes which philosophers such as Locke, Hume or Kant made possible all revolve around the idea that in order to discuss science, and later public life, language must be purely denotational or referential and should break free from indexicalsâof place or of social class in particular. Cosmopolitanism in Germany, England or Scotlandâanother hallmark of modernityâinfluenced the rejection of parochial allegiances and the emergence of a special type of language that new bourgeois public spheres demanded for the exercise of polite conversation (Habermas 1991). Cosmopolitanism and decontextualisation emphasise the need for a neutral, i.e. purely referential medium of communication available to all for the conduct of common affairs and the government of the nation, thus, in principle, affording to all who can acquire such a medium the (at least theoretical) possibility to take part without the burdensome interference of social or geographic provenance. This, we argue, is also the point to which standard languages can be traced back (see also Gal this volume).
Viewing language standards as an outcome of modernity allows us to emphasise one of the main defining characteristics of such linguistic modalities: that they are meant to represent a form of decontextualised, neutral, widely accessible and learnable languageâa voice from nowhere, as Susan Gal and Kathryn Woolard have written (1995), drawing on Thomas Nagelâs (1986) notion of the âview from nowhereâ. This points to the intimate connection between standard language and differentiated social spheres, such as the notion of public and private spheres as defined from the 18th century onwards in Europe. This laid the groundwork for considerations about which languages should be used to do science, politics and public life. It was in this context, for example, that Hume denounced in 1752 the use of Scotticisms among his fellow countrymen as unfit for polite conversation,2 thus linking language with the formation of the new public sphere of Enlightenment Europe.
It should finally be emphasised that standard languages are, from a historical perspective, primarily written languages. As Mary Slaughter (1982) explains, in the same way that projects of invented, universal languages were primarily written ones (which associated one sign with one notion thought to be universal), standard languages initially stem from a reflection on written language. The written medium came to be part of the definition of legitimate knowledge, and of how this knowledge should be conveyed. This element has proven crucial in minority language movementsâto the point that Robert Lafont, an Occitan sociolinguist and a prominent minority language advocate from the 1950s to the early 2000s, has referred to the mystique of the written word as pertaining to the ârevivalist ideology of the redemptive textâ3 (Lafont 1997, 117). The origins of standards in the written word are emphasised by John Joseph (1987), and the importance of the written medium is also apparent in the chapters presented in this book.
While the initial philosophical impetus for decontextualised and neutral language is central to the logic of standards, it is another one of the features we mentioned at the onset of this section which ensured the...
