Prescription and Tradition in Language

Establishing Standards across Time and Space

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Carol Percy, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Carol Percy

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783096527
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book contextualises case studies across a wide variety of languages and cultures, crystallising key interrelationships between linguistic standardisation and prescriptivism, and between ideas and practices. It focuses on different traditions of standardisation and prescription throughout the world and addresses questions such as how nationalistic idealisations of 'traditional' language persist (or shift) amid language change, linguistic variation and multilingualism. The volume explores issues of standardisation and the sociolinguistic phenomenon of prescription as a formative influence on the notional standard language as well as the interconnections between these in a wide range of geographical contexts. It balances the otherwise strong emphasis on English in English language publications on prescriptivism and breaks new ground with its multilingual approach across languages and nations. The book will appeal to scholars working within different linguistic traditions interested in questions relating to all aspects of standardisation and prescriptivism.

1Prescription and Tradition: Establishing Standards across Time and Space

Carol Percy and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

Introduction

Different languages have undergone different standardisation processes in the course of their histories. For some, such as English and Dutch, standard languages developed from the Renaissance onwards, while for other languages, e.g. Basque or Macedonian, standardisation was initiated only relatively recently. Whatever their origins, duration and distribution, all these developments reflect a perceived need for prescription, which itself derives from linguistic, cultural, religious, ideological, political, educational and other needs (see e.g. Edwards, 2012). These factors often occur in complex combinations. Moreover, although prescription is widely regarded as a late stage of the standardisation process, this categorisation is tied to studies of standards in monolingual, Western cultures. And even in these cultures recent large-scale corpus studies have confirmed that the relation between prescript and practice is both complicated and inconsistent.

Prescription and Tradition in Language: Establishing Standards across Time and Space contextualises case studies across languages and cultures, crystallising some key interrelationships between linguistic standardisation and prescription and between ideas and practices. These case studies consider some key questions:

Historical. France has an academy; England has only had private initiatives. Do such different historical motives and contexts for prescriptivism produce different manifestations of present-day prescriptivism, and if so, how? The traditions for French and English have been well established since the 17th and 18th centuries. What rhetorical conventions perpetuate the tradition, presenting information as if they were already and have always been accepted? What happens when traditions cross oceans and change cultures? What issues are particular to the American tradition, for instance, in relation to the English one? Varieties of English have spread farther around the world in the course of the 20th century. How have loanwords – from English or from other languages – been regarded in different cultures? How do nationalistic idealisations of ‘traditional’ languages persist (or shift) amid language change and multilingualism – in Iceland and in Britain? What happens when prescriptive traditions are disrupted – for instance, upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union or of former Yugoslavia?

Modern. Case studies in such political contexts allow us to contrast changes in both usage and attitudes. (How) do strong and centralised language policies translate into democratic, newly independent states like Lithuania and Macedonia? How distinctive are prescriptive issues relating to minority languages? Historical as well as present-day contexts allow contrastive studies: how does the status of Russian differ as a majority and as a minority language? And how does the status of Basque differ in France, where it is not an official language, from that in Spain, where it is a co-official one? Finally, what functions do the media have in the codification of such minority languages as Basque and Frisian? Has electronically mediated communication affected usage and popular attitudes to usage for Chinese, English, Lithuanian and Russian, and if so, how?

General/theoretical. Many of the chapters in this book analyse the roles of linguists and academics in contemporary language planning, and the stereotypical gulf between professional and popular attitudes to language variation. In practice, to what extent have linguists’ political actions related to their work as language scientists? When linguists have codified and established contemporary language standards, to what extent and on what grounds have they recorded and tolerated variation? On a more abstract level, how do codifications and definitions of the ‘standard’ obscure the existence of variation? From cross-cultural and culture-dependent definitions of a ‘standard’, can one abstract the elusive concept of standardness in language? To the extent that prescriptivism is culture dependent and politically motivated, do learners of foreign languages regard variation and error in different ways? Finally, if prescriptive attitudes are culture dependent, are there any predictable principles of prescriptivism? Might these be correlated not with social but with such formal factors as writing systems?

The structure of our collection reflects the trends in our questions. Part 1 surveys General and Theoretical Approaches, considering formal as well as sociocultural factors. Part 2 applies the volume’s cross-cultural perspectives to case studies of Prescription and Tradition in Language. Part 3 provides in-depth perspectives on a specific tradition: Usage Guides: an English Tradition, and Part 4 concludes with Current Issues and Challenges, considering the impact of such factors as new media, political change and transnational migration on attitudes to language. And the collection ends with an ‘Epilogue’ by Pam Peters, in which she reviews the chapters and places them in a wider international perspective.

The Chapters

Part 1: General and Theoretical

Linguistic prescription is often categorised as a final stage in the language standardisation process. This is done, for instance, in the model developed by Milroy and Milroy ([1985] 2012: 22−23), which is largely based on that by Haugen (1966). Though Haugen’s model is generally resorted to in discussions of standardisation processes of different languages, it is the absence of a prescription stage that makes it less suitable as a general model of standardisation for the topic dealt with in this collection (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2012). Linguistic prescriptivism, which may be defined as the ‘attempt to intervene in the “natural” social life of a language’ (Edwards, 2012: 17), may be regarded as, in effect, a reflection of the prescription stage, acquiring strong negative connotations in the process.¹ Conceptions of standardisation have, moreover, mostly been abstracted from Western and monolingual cultures, and even within these they may not be uniform. Are there universal principles of prescription (and of prescriptivism), or might these be culture specific? With these questions in mind, many of the contributors in Part 1 consider prescription and its traditions in the contexts of multilingual and/or non-Western language norms.

Dick Smakman and Sandra Nekesa Barasa anchor this part, as well as the collection as a whole, with their chapter called ‘Defining “Standard”: Towards a Cross-Cultural Definition of the Language Norm’. They begin by identifying some of the stereotypical attributes of standard languages. In Western monolingual cultures, standard languages are typically defined as supraregional; inclusive as a lingua franca; exclusive as an official and prestigious medium of higher education and administration; codified and cultivated over time. Smakman and Barasa anatomise some of the realities of standards in multilingual countries. In postcolonial settings, the former colonial language may (or may not) retain its exclusive and official functions, while more inclusive and communicative functions are the properties of regional language(s). And in diglossic cultures, the social as well as the linguistic functions of standard languages may be separated: a cultivated standard language may index the prestige of its writer, but lack the social power of the language of the marketplace. In such settings, code-switching itself may serve as a kind of standard, since in reality it is documented in formal oral settings in multilingual cultures. And some lingua francas may not be codified or even written down. By surveying practices in multilingual countries, Smakman and Barasa discover some unexpected realities of standardisation and thus anticipate some related practices of prescription.

Linguistic prescription attempts to reduce variation and to retard change (cf. Milroy & Milroy, [1985] 2012: 22, 35). In another comparative chapter and dealing with the topic on a more generally fundamental level, Florian Coulmas considers potential correlations between ‘Prescriptivism and Writing Systems’. Coulmas focuses on six different writing systems – from alphabetic and syllabic to logographic. He begins by considering how characters are organised in the system and how words (or roots, in Arabic) are organised in codifying texts like dictionaries. Organising principles differ across systems: the Roman alphabet is organised arbitrarily, Indic Devanāgarī, (Japanese) Kana and (Korean) Hangul characters are organised by the sounds they represent and logographic Chinese characters by their shape. In the case of Arabic characters, over time the system’s order has shifted from an alphabetic random order to one based on character shape; in Arabic dictionaries, elements appear in ‘root order’. The chapter’s subcategories assess potential connections between the types of writing systems and linguistic purism as well as with literacy and its difficulties. Loanwords disrupt the stability of standard languages and sometimes of their writing systems and their dictionaries as well. Loanwords seem harder to integrate into Chinese since its characters are associated with Chinese morphemes as well as syllables; in contrast, Japanese incorporates foreign characters as well as foreign loanwords. But puristic impulses are principally cultural: North Korea’s abandonment of Chinese characters in favour of the ‘national’ script, Hangul, can be understood as a form of written purism. Moreover, the existence of diglossia in a culture does not seem to reflect the complexity of its official language’s writing system: to those language users who had no opportunity to learn it, (potentially) phonetic Latin was as elite as Chinese. And ultimately there seems to be no clear relationship between the type of writing system and the speed of linguistic change: the phonetic systems of Romance and Arabic languages (and more recently of Korean and Japanese) do not seem to retard change; nor is there any evidence that diachronic change is speedier in languages related to and written in Chinese. Considering formal rather than sociocultural factors, Coulmas’s chapter keeps in focus some of the main aims of prescriptivism.

Surveying differences between theoretical and practical standards concerns, Henning Klöter’s ‘“What is Correct Chinese?” Revisited’ focuses on a 1961 essay by Yuen Ren Chao (1892−1982), a Chinese-American linguist, language planner and author of the landmark Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968). Unlike Coulmas, whose chapter deals with writing systems, Klöter focuses mostly on standardising speech, and specifically on the efficacy of the prescriptive methods used by the Chinese government to establish the northern Beijing dialect of Mandarin as the standard national pronunciation. The figure of the linguist Yuen Ren Chao allows Klöter to focus on the process of standardisation and the impact of prescriptivism – from Chao’s first attempts to codify and record an artificial standard with some southern elements to the government’s eventual implementation of Beijing pronunciation in the spreading educational system. In the People’s Republic of China ‘state agencies’ are ‘the sole definers of correctness’. But Klöter can also contrast theory and practice: although the new standard was intended to be less elitist than 19th-century Mandarin, contemporary evidence suggests that standard Mandarin is neither widespread nor well-loved, used by a little more than half the population. Moreover, thanks to the new media, Klöter can observe that the general public is both aware and critical of state-sanctioned prescriptivism, here in the case of entry selection principles in the latest official dictionary of modern Chinese. Such variation in Mandarin is increasingly visible with China’s rise as an economic superpower and the language’s official status in Taiwan and Singapore. But Klöter observes that the pluricentricity of Mandarin is not (yet) acknowledged. And although a variety of ‘dialects’ are spoken in China, the ideology of national monolingualism (and an accompanying writing system) obscures multilingual realities.

How are minority languages standardised in multilingual settings? While criticising the threats that prescriptivism poses to language variation, in ‘The Uselessness of the Useful: Language Standardisation and Variation in Multilingual Contexts’ Felix K. Ameka also shows that the drive to standardise language is a universal human one, however threatening or ineffectual. After illustrating how reducing a Mexican language to writing eliminates its pragmatic particles, Ameka documents instances of prescriptivism in a number of multilingual African countries, particularly in Ghana. He reports the official status of postcolonial English in Cameroon, where pidgin is prohibited on university campuses, and in Ghana, where some vernacular languages are stigmatised by teachers of the official language, English. Ameka documents the persistence of these pidgins and vernaculars, spoken despite prohibitions. Ameka also shows how some of these minority oral languages are subject to linguistic prescriptivism. South-eastern Ghana is so multilingual that the Ethnologue cannot map all the languages that are spoken there. In such multilingual settings, the variation between and within languages has produced some characteristic prescriptive behaviour. Adult speakers of a minority language like Nyagbo criticise children’s loanwords as a corruption of what they consider to be a more authentic variety of an uncodified language. And classroom teachers of an official language like Ewe criticise its student native speakers, whose dialect is inevitably different from the standard Ewe codified in the 19th century by European missionaries – a hybrid of no native variety. Ameka’s chapter focuses on the correction of children, at home and in the classroom, which is an important if not always effective site of prescriptive activity.

If prescriptive attitudes reflect domestic national politics, do foreign learners of standard languages have different attitudes to those norms? Katja Lochtman describes how Belgian university learners conceive of correctness in ‘Prescriptivism and Sociolinguistic Competence in German as a Foreign Language’. She is particularly interested in learners’ awareness of and attitudes towards the kinds of language variation characteristic of native speakers. Incidentally confirming Ameka’s assertion that prescriptivism threatens regional dialects, Lochtman characterises the most typical ‘non-standard’ variants in the speech of native German speakers as colloquialisms as well as the kinds of ‘errors’ criticised by prescriptivists. A prominent prescriptivist in contemporary Germany is the stand-up comedian and journalist Bastian Sick (b. 1965). By using some of Sick’s articles to elicit essays by Belgian learners of German, Lochtman discovered that most of these university students have a relatively conservative attitude to variation, attentive more to ‘correctness’ than to ‘appropriateness’. Indeed, it is typical that the students agree with Sick’s prescriptive attitude but are unable fully to appreciate his humour. Lochtman is aware that classroom practices explain learners’ conservative attitudes, and reflects on methods that might teach not only language norms but ‘sociolinguistic and intercultural competence in GFL teaching’.

Part 2: Prescription and Tradition

The chapters in Part 2 explore some traditions of prescription, and some 19th-century developments in detail. Some chapters will draw on corpora to chart prescript and practice and the relation (or not) between them: as Klöter’s chapter has demonstrated, even a politically powerful state cannot control all aspects of language standardisation.

Each country’s language has its own history of standardisation, as Smakman and Barasa observe in their chapter in Part 1. Do differences in sociocultural context produce different ways of implementing prescriptivism? And (how) can electronic corpora of both prescript and usage allow scholars to assess the impact of prescriptions across time? By way of beginning Part 2’s attention to Prescription and Tradition in Language, Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade present ‘Prescriptivism in a Comparative Perspective: The Case of France and England’. The authors take as their starting point the stereotypical difference between French and British prescriptivism: ‘official and legislative action’ in France as opposed to private initiatives in England. The process began a century earlier in France, and to some extent its centralisation reflects the absolute monarchy of the 17th century; England, in contrast, was associated with political liberty after the execution of Charles I and the exile of James II. But this chapter emphasises linguistic commonalities as well as contrasts: French reference works served as inspiration for English ones, and indeed the rise of usage guides (along with other reference works) reflects increasing social mobility in both countries. Through the 19th century, the rise of mass education further emphasised the vernacular and the need for codifying it, whether from above or from below. Language norms are promoted in both French and British media; indeed, Tieken-Boon van Ostade observes that as the state broadcaster, the BBC is perceived as a semi-official academy of language. However, linguistic variation in public language reveals the limitations of prescriptivism, while both old and new media provide prescriptive platforms for enterprising individuals and institutions.

Many of our chapters confirm the importance of print media as promoters of the cultural-linguistic nationalism so characteristic of 19th-century Europe, while others illustrate the role of literary authors in the history of the tradition, especially as exemplars in reference books. Rita Queiroz de Barros explores the intersection of these issues in ‘“A Higher Standard of Correctness than is Quite Desirable”: Linguistic Prescriptivism in Charles Dickens’s Journals’. As an author, Dickens (1812−1870) represented language variation in his novels and thereby covertly promoted a complex ideology of language standards. As the editor of literary journals in the 1850s and 1860s, Dickens publicised the linguistic opinions of a range of other anonymous authors. Some of the reviews remind us that prescriptivism is not monolithic: one reviewer concluded that a linguistic etiquette book promotes ‘a higher standard of correctness than is quite desirable’; another did not object to slang when confined to its place. But the cultural nationalism of 19th...