Standard English

11 Key excerpts on "Standard English"

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  English Historical Linguistics. Volume 1

  • Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  This useful and somewhat uncontentious sense of the term, however, was soon replaced by another which was much more difficult and which became central to significant social, political, and cultural debates in the 20th cen-tury. This used the meaning of “standard” as not referring to uniformity, but to a level of excellence; when applied to speech, it referred to “a variety of the speech of a country which, by reason of its cultural status and currency, is held to represent the best form of that speech”. “Standard English”, the OED definition continued, was “that form of the English language which is spoken (with modifications, individual or local), by the gen-erality of the cultured people in Great Britain”. And in case there was any doubt about precisely whom the “cultured” were who spoke the best form of English, the dictionary cited a contemporary textbook on phonetics: “Standard English, like Standard French, is now a class dialect more than a local dialect: it is the language of the educated all over Great Britain” (Crowley 2003: 116). The difficulties caused by the confusion between these distinct senses of the term “Standard English” have been examined in detail elsewhere (Crowley 2003). It is important to note, however, that despite the fact that linguists of almost all varieties reject the type of prescriptivism that underpins complaints around speech, such criti-cism persists. The vast majority of the protests center upon a misunderstanding of the nature of semantic change – as noted earlier – or on the use in speech of a small number of forms which do not correspond to their grammatical counterparts in writing. These include subject verb agreement ( they was ); formation of past tense ( have fell, I done ); negatives ( ain’t ); use of adverbs ( run quick ); demonstrative pronouns ( them girls ); pronouns ( me and him did it ); prepositions ( out the house ).

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  Studying the History of Early English

  • Simon Horobin(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER Standardization 3 In this chapter we will be looking at the establishment of a standard variety of English, a process known as standardization. This raises a fundamental question which we need to address at the outset: what is Standard English? There are several key features of a standard language, each of which must be considered in any study of the process of standardization. The most import-ant defining feature of a standard language is its uniformity and resistance to change. Another aspect is that a standard language should be ‘suprar-egional’, that is, not tied to any particular locality and can be used by any individual irrespective of his or her geographical origins. Both factors are well-demonstrated by present-day Standard English, which consists of a series of rules which enable us to determine whether a word is spelled correctly or incorrectly, whether a sentence is correctly formed or not. Another feature of a standard language is that it is used for a variety of different linguistic func-tions. Standard English is the language used by our government, legal system and educational system, all of which uses help to reinforce and sustain its continued acceptance as the standard variety of English. Its association with these various institutions also lends it prestige, so that it is the variety that people associate with social advancement. Present-day Standard English has also been ‘codified’: that is, its rules have been set out in various grammar books and dictionaries so that there is a common agreement over what is acceptable and what is not. While each of these aspects is fulfilled by Standard English spelling and grammar, they are less true of the Standard English reference accent, known as Received Pronunciation (RP). RP is an accent that is spoken by members of a certain class rather than people from a particular geographical area.

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  A Survey of Modern English

  • Stephan E Gramley, Michael Pátzold(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1 The English language Standards and variation 1.1 Standard English There is little explicit agreement about just how Standard English (StE) should be regarded. Almost everyone who works with English assumes at least implicitly that it exists, but the descriptions made of it – for example, in dictionaries and grammar books, to say nothing of manuals of style – indicate that there is a certain amount of diversity in people’s ideas about StE. Yet, there are dictionaries, grammars and manuals of style, and what they document – some would say prescribe – is what is most often understood by StE (see 1.3 and 1.4). A standard language is used as a model in the speech community at large. In 1.3 you will read about four defining characteristics involved in the process of standardization: selection, acceptance, elaboration and codification. That this is necessary is evident in the cases of so many indigenous languages in Third World countries (see Chapter 14) which for lack of a native standard have adopted a standardized European language such as English, hoping in this way to ease the path to ‘economic prosperity, science and technology, development and modernization, and the attractions of popular culture’ and paying the price of loss of self-expression and diminishment in feelings of cultural worth (Bailey 1990: 87). The result is that ‘the old political empire with its metropolis and colonial outposts has nearly disappeared, replaced by a cultural empire of “English-speaking peoples"’ (ibid.: 83). This quotation indicates that codification can also be overdone if English becomes the instrument of cultural imperialism. In order for English to occupy a more deeply rooted position within post-colonial societies it must draw on the everyday usage of its speakers, and this includes the recognition not only of non-standard forms, but also of non-native ones

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  Meeting the Standards in Primary English

  A Guide to ITT NC

  • Eve English, John Williamson(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  On the other hand, one major national study of non-standard dialects found that 97.5 per cent of schools surveyed reported the use of them as a demonstrative adjective in constructions like ‘Look at them big spiders’ (Cheshire et al., 1993, p. 65). Now we come to a very important point: the tendency for all dialects to share words and constructions applies also to Standard English because Standard English is a dialect by our definition. If we look at the example above, ‘Look at them big spiders’, we can note that the words ‘look’, ‘at’, ‘big’ and ‘spiders’ are all used with exactly the same meaning as they would have in Standard English. Grammatically there are shared features too, including the use of the imperative ‘look’ and the adjective ‘big’ premodifying the noun ‘spiders’. Standard English has been mentioned several times now and it is perhaps time to try to define it. Any standard language is no more than a dialect with an army and a navy. Cited in Carter, 1995, p. 149 Carter’s somewhat jocular reference highlights the point that Standard English is in many ways a dialect which carries with it a particular power and prestige. Standard English is, in fact, a notoriously difficult term to define but one helpful way is to think about the uses to which it is put. Trudgill (1983, p. 17) suggests: Standard English is that variety of English which is usually used in print, and which is normally taught in schools and to non-native speakers learning the language. It is also the variety which is normally spoken by educated people and used in news broadcasts and other similar situations. This should be illuminating for anyone with a good knowledge of the use of English in this country although it does leave the specifics of the grammar and vocabulary unmentioned. Wardhaugh (1992, p. 30) offers another way of thinking about the issue: Standardization refers to the process by which a language has been codified in some way

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  The Politics of English

  • Marnie Holborow(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Standard speech came to be defined as the variety of speech which 'by reason of its cultural status and currency is held to represent the best form of that speech' (Harris 1988:18-19). Items were selected and then sealed: '[a]s soon as a standard 168 The Politics of English language has been formed . . . the lexicographer is bound to deal with that alone' (quoted in Crowley 1989: 117). The publication of the OED thus 'set a historic seal of approval on that choice'. Thus, Murray's compilation of the dictionary becomes both the discovery of the standard language and the creation of it. As Harris notes: There can hardly be a more remarkable example in intellectual history of quoting one's own evidence in order to establish the validity of what was claimed/ Standard English was simulta-neously discovered and created. It was indeed a self-fulfilling prophecy (Harris 1988: 17). The invention of this particular brand of Standard English fitted well with the ideology of the dominant social class of Victorian times. It provided a convenient model for mass education which set Standard English aside as the language of the educated and also implied that the speech that working-class children brought to school needed to be improved. By the end of the century, this divide between Standard English and people's spoken language had become an established fact. This description in Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) captures something of the degree to which this division had become 'common sense': Mrs Durbeyfield habitually spoke the dialect; her daughter, who had passed the Sixth Standard in the National School under a London-trained mistress, spoke two languages: the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad and to persons of quality. (Hardy 1992: 28) Standard English had thus become what 'persons of quality' spoke, a badge of education and class. It was during this period that further distinctions were made for 'correct' pronunciation.

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  The Routledge Handbook of English Language Studies

  • Philip Seargeant, Ann Hewings, Stephen Pihlaja, Philip Seargeant, Ann Hewings, Stephen Pihlaja(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The standard ideology is promoted through public channels: in the past, standardization has first affected the writing system, and literacy has subsequently become the main influence in promoting the consciousness of the standard ideology. The norms of written and formal English have then been codified in dictionaries, grammars and handbooks of usage and inculcated by prescription through the educational system. Standardization through prescription has clearly been most successful in the written channel: in the daily conversation of ordinary speakers, however, it has been less effective. Indeed, the norms of colloquial, as against formal, English have not been codified to any extent.

  Precisely because of the fact that what counts as standard is deeply ideological, it is therefore not surprising to note that there is ‘no general consensus’ as to what Standard English is (Bex and Watts 1999: 1). That being said, possibly the best place to start appreciating the contemporary controversies and, indeed, anxieties surrounding standards in English is to consider the assertion made, for example, by Honey (1997, see also the discussion in Cameron 1995) that Standard English is the variety spoken and written by educated speakers.

  This is a highly controversial attempt to answer the question ‘What is Standard English?’ because it relies on a number of assumptions that appear to be problematic (see Crowley 1999). For one, since there are significant differences between the grammar of spoken and written English, characterizing both as Standard English simply evades the important question of how such differences do not undermine the claim of unity, that is, whether there is a need to distinguish between Standard Written English and Standard Spoken English. This is not a trivial issue because grammatical differences are also the kinds of things that presumably distinguish Standard English from its non-standard counterparts. This issue, if left unaddressed, means that we are left with the further and arguably even more perplexing question of how much variation (and of what kind) is tolerated before the differences in linguistic practices that distinguish Standard Written and Standard Spoken English become characterized as non-standard.

  A second point is that the group, ‘educated speakers’, that Honey relies on to ground his definition of Standard English is not at all homogeneous, since there are different levels of education and, of course, different educational institutions that enjoy varying degrees of prestige and credibility. All these considerations bring up the question of just what kind of education is needed before a speaker is deemed to be a speaker of Standard English. This in turn raises the highly contentious question of who decides that a speaker has been sufficiently educated to be considered a speaker of Standard English. Simply asserting that other speakers of Standard English are the best judges will not do because of the vicious circularity involved in this line of argument. Claiming that there is an ineffable nature to Standard English that is clearly recognized even by those who may not be competent in it is equally problematic because it shifts the grounds of argument from scholarly debate to matters of taste and faith, and raises the contentious issue of who specifically ought to be the arbiters of such taste and faith. This shift needs to be avoided as far as possible because, as we will see shortly, what counts as Standard English can significantly impact on the social and economic fortunes of individuals. The intersection between Standard English and matters of social justice is too important to be left to the tastes and faith of a (self-)selected few.

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  Handbook of Language and Communication: Diversity and Change

  • Marlis Hellinger, Anne Pauwels, Marlis Hellinger, Anne Pauwels(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Standard British English is the only variety approved for use in Jamaican schools. 3. Language standardization as language planning Language standardization can be considered as a kind of language planning, i.e. planned efforts to change aspects of language form and use (on language planning, see Ricento, this vol.; also Skutnabb-Kangas, this vol.). Language planning decisions typically attempt to reduce linguistic diversity, as in in-stances where a single language is declared a national language in a multilingual country (e.g. Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia) or where a single variety of a lan-guage is declared “standard” to promote linguistic unity in a country where di-vergent dialects exist, e.g. standard Dutch in the Netherlands. In many cases standards do not evolve internally from within a language community, but are imposed from outside. This often happens as a result of colonization (on lan- 688 Suzanne Romaine guage and colonialism, see Migge and Léglise, this vol.). One of the first steps of Christian missionaries who set up the first schools in linguistically diverse Papua New Guinea, was to choose and codify one variant of a local language as a mission standard. This meant creating an orthography for it and vocabulary for the expression of new Christian concepts. Lutheran missionaries chose the Wemo dialect as the standard for the Kâte language in 1892. Today the other main dialects have all but disappeared. The same is true for the “non-standard” dialects of Yabem, an Austronesian language also used as a mission lingua franca. Other planning activities involving standardization include introducing a written norm where none existed previously, or modifying/modernizing a pre-existing form. Kemal Atatürk, for example, decreed that Turkish would be written with the Roman alphabet rather than Arabic script.

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  The Emergence of the English Native Speaker

  A Chapter in Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought

  • Stephanie Hackert(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  […] It is perhaps said, “You admit a considerable amount of differentiation in your so-called Standard English, and yet you adhere to the conception of a Standard. How is this logical?” The reply to this objection is, that the distinctions between the different forms of Standard English are very slight, almost imperceptible, indeed, to any but the most alert and practised observer, and that they shrink to a negligible quantity compared with the differences between out-and-out “Vulgarism” on the one hand, or provincial – that is, regional – dialects on the other. In Standard English, as with all other forms of speech, a certain degree of divergence is possible, without such divergence being felt as constituting a different dialect. Of a dozen speakers of Standard English, each may possess slight differences of utterance, or phra-seology, and yet none feel that the speech of any of the others, even where it differs from his own, verges towards Vulgarism or “Dialect” in the special sense. (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 354–355) To sum up, with regard to the spoken form of Standard English, variation was not only recognized but at the same time officially endorsed, as it satisfied the theo-retical demand that language be living and changing rather than artificial and 132 The question of standard spoken English and the dialects dead, an idea to be discussed in more detail below. Thus, unlike the written, liter-ary standard, the spoken standard could not be described as uniform linguisti-cally; it therefore had to be described by means to the group of speakers to which it “belonged,” i.e., the class of (public-school) educated Britons. These speakers and their linguistic behavior were then described by means of epithets such as “good” and “best,” which obviously introduced a strongly evaluative dimension into the debate about spoken Standard English.

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  Standard Written English

  A Guide

  • Philip Gaskell(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  This may be true as far as the spoken language is concerned (though other linguists dispute it2); but there can be no doubt that SWE, an international standard form of written English, does actually exist, whatever the linguists say, and that it is in constant, widespread use. It is the form used by those for whom writing is a part of their professional life, whether or not they learned English as their first language; it is the form used for such things as works of scholarship and reference, encyclopedias, literary essays, textbooks, and official reports, and for the paper traffic of effective business and good government. (It is a form which is also used by creative writers, though their work com- monly includes elements of the spoken language and of other forms peculiar to fiction, poetry, and drama.) 1. Strictly speaking they should be called ‘linguisticians’, but they dislike the term, and I shall call them ‘linguists’ here. 2. See John Honey, Language is Power: The Story o f Standard English and its Enemies , 1997, which bravely argues against the levellers that there should be - and is - both a spoken and a written Standard English. S T A N D A R D WRI TT E N E N G L IS H 3 SWE: an international form While users of SWE may speak, and perhaps write informally, in ways that vary considerably from each other, the style of their formal writing is as a rule little affected by their nationality. To take the two major branches of the language, British English (BrE) and American English (AmE), we all know that there are a few differences between them of spelling (such as colour/color), vocabulary (pavement/sidewalk), idioms (at a loose end/at loose ends), verb formations (got/gotten), and grammar (don't let' s do it/let's don't do it).

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  Towards a Standard English

  1600 - 1800

  • Dieter Stein, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Dieter Stein, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  1. Notions of standard A major theoretical issue lies in the fact that it is not the case that all of the in-cipient or, to various degrees, embryonic forms of more widely used prestige 2 Dieter Stein varieties in the history of English could, by a more strict definition, be called standard languages. There seem to be three uses of the term standardiza-tion. There is an extended use which would apply to all manner of varieties, the notion of standardization with standard as the resulting variety. To this type of variety James Milroy (this volume) assigns the term supra-local language norms. These constitute localized or regional norm standards. Such varieties are instances of language convergence in various degrees and certainly carry prestige, which is largely a function of their use in various combinations of the following situations, such as are listed by Görlach (1988: 133-134): a) as a written language b) as a literary language c) as a religious language d) as a language of education and science e) as a language of the law courts, parliament and the court etc. f) as a lingua franca g) as a national language h) as a language of the mass media (newspaper, radio, television etc.). This first, wide, notion of the term standard seems to be inherent in the majority of work on at least the history of English (Görlach 1988, Trahern 1989). A second, narrow or restricted, definition of standardization was devel-oped in language planning research in countries with no nationally accepted varieties and with the problem of having a language in addition to a range of dialects. Haugen (1966) describes the following constitutive processes in creating a standard language: • selection • codification • elaboration • acceptance. Garvin (1964), based on Garvin and Mathiot (1960), gives the following defining features for a standard language: 1. the intrinsic properties of a standard language; 2. the functions of a standard language within the culture of a speech commu-nity; 3.

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  Language of Inequality

  • Nessa Wolfson, Joan Manes(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  This is impressive because (if for 228 Franklin C. Southworth no other reason) this consensus is shared by many people who do not really know the standard form, not only by those fortunate enough to have learned it at home or in school. Most individuals also accept without question the general principle that there can only be one standard—just as there can be only one king in a monarchy, one president or prime minister in a democracy, and only one seat of government in each political entity. A related principle, also accepted implicitly, is that the 'standard' form of a language must be defined within very rigid limits. Some usages are 'correct', others are 'incor-rect'. If we look at the actual behavior of people in contemporary stratified societies, we see a different picture. Whatever people's expressed or unex-pressed views toward 'correct' language may be, when they use language they tend to use a variety which is appropriate to the context. The choice of the appropriate variety is often made without much conscious thought, but analysis of stylistic variation shows that people respond to a complex array of situational cues in making these choices. For example, a formal speech or lecture requires a different style of speech than, say, an informal conversation about a football game. (Apart from differences in the content, there would be many linguistic differences such as the length and complexity of sentences, the use of formal words (such as therefore or consequently ) in the one case, and informal expressions like Hey... or y'know ... in the other.) 10 The usual view of language, including the official view of educational and other governmental institutions, has no place for this notion of appropriateness. There is, in the usual conception, a variety of language which is 'proper' or 'pure' or 'correct'; all others are either 'incorrect' or 'colloquial' or'slang' or 'corrupt' or 'low-class' or 'local' or something of the sort.

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