3

Language Standardization
in a View ‘from Below’
Stephan Elspaß

3.1  Introduction

While Chapter 2 has presented and discussed the process of language

standardization in a view from above, the present chapter will shift to a view
from below. The term ‘from below’ evokes two concepts: firstly, the Labovian
notion of a change from below, which refers to ‘the operation of internal,
linguistic factors’ and processes of language change which are ‘below the
level of social awareness’ (Labov 1994: 78). Secondly, standardization from
below calls to mind the ‘language history from below’ approach, which
entails both a focus on oral registers and the language use of members of
the lower ranks of society in language history; thus, it refers to a twofold
‘bottom-up approach’ in language historiography (cf. Elspaß 2007). Like
in Chapter 2, the terms ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ will be used in the
latter (i.e. the historical-sociolinguistic) sense. While standardization from
above essentially corresponds to processes in which authorities successfully
implement certain language varieties and variants to become ‘the stand-
ard’ in a nation-state (cf. Chapter 2), ‘standardization from below’ describes
both the development of a vernacular to become a standard variety, under-
stood as ‘a uniform and consistent norm of writing that is widely accepted
by its speakers’ (Haugen 1994: 4340), and the emergence of language vari-
ants from vernaculars into a standard variety, even despite the preference
of other variants by language authorities. While implementation is a crucial
aspect of standardization from above, standardization from below can be
characterized by conventionalization and a widespread acceptance of varieties
and variants which have undergone such processes. (Note that this mean-
ing of ‘acceptance’ differs from the use in Milroy & Milroy 1991: 27–8,
where ‘acceptance’ is seen as one stage in the implementation process of
a standard.) In this respect, standardization from above corresponds to a

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 94 ST E P H A N E L S PA ß

change from above, whereas standardization from below is related to the

­concept of a change from below.
Section 3.2 will start with a clarification and substantiation of what is
meant by language standardization in a perspective from below based on
a critical review of current histories of linguistic standardization and theo-
ries on language standardization. This is followed by a presentation of the
‘language history from below’ approach, which emerged in response to
the call for alternative language histories at the turn of the millennium,
and it will discuss the implications of this approach for language histori-
ography and the theory of language standardization in particular. Section
3.3 will reflect on the central methodological question regarding the texts
and text editions by which authors were and should be selected for the
description and explanation of standardization processes. After having
established the range of texts which are necessary for standardization
studies, Section 3.4 will present findings of case studies in recent research
in (historical) sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on the limits of pre-
scriptivism and prescriptive norms on language usage. The chapter will
conclude in Section 3.5 with an outlook on possible future directions in
standardization studies based on the different perspectives from above
and from below.

3.2  What Is Language Standardization ‘from Below’?

An analysis of language standardization from a different perspective is

inextricably linked to a more general approach to language history (i.e.
‘language history from below’; cf. Section 3.2.2). As outlined in Section 3.1,
the main concern of a view of language standardization from below is the
consideration of the contributions of non-elite writers and, in particular,
informal texts by such writers to standardization processes. This view may
appear unusual, as conventional historical-linguistic narratives suggest
that standardization is a process that is mostly imposed from above. It will
be argued here that such narratives are a consequence of data selection
driven by a standard language ideology in traditional histories of linguistic
standardization. The concept of language standardization in a view from
below, however, rests on the assumption that potentially all members of a
language community and all of their forms of verbal interaction have con-
tributed to the standardization processes of this language.

3.2.1 A Critical Review of Traditional Histories of Linguistic

Standardization and Standardization Models
Since the 1990s, traditional language histories and their depiction of stand-
ardization have been increasingly questioned. As a result, ‘alternative lan-
guage histories’ have been called for (e.g. Watts & Trudgill 2002; Elspaß

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 Language Standardization in a View ‘from Below’ 95

2015a). The narratives of traditional histories of language standardization

have been criticized on several grounds:

(1) Traditional histories of linguistic standardization are driven by a highly

teleological perspective (presented in the ‘funnel model’ of standardi-
zation; cf. Milroy 1992: 51–2; Watts 2011: 290–4, 2012: 585–7).
(2) Traditional narratives are biased towards a succession of supposedly
homogenous varieties; this has been characterized as ‘tunnel vision’
(Watts & Trudgill 2002:1) or the ‘tunnel view’ (Watts 2012: 585) of lan-
guage historiography. The notion of homogenous varieties is, in turn,
a consequence of the fact that the standard ideology is projected back
to the past (cf. Milroy & Milroy 1991: 22–3, and Milroy 1992: 124–5 for
English; Durrell 2000 for German).
(3) As a result of the notion of homogenous standard languages, tradi-
tional narratives tend to neglect the role of ongoing historical language
variation in language standardization processes. To the present-day
reader, this often leads to the impression that linguistic variation is
something new, or even a symptom of ‘destandardization’ (cf. Auer &
Spiekermann 2011).
(4) For the modern period (i.e. from the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury onwards), traditional histories of language standardization are
biased towards printed texts by (mostly male) writers from the elites
(cf. Fairman 2012: 207, 2015: 55; Rutten & van der Wal 2014: 3). Such
texts represent selected and ‘corrected’ texts from formal registers,
such as academic writing, newspaper texts or administrative texts, and
from fictional literature, in particular (cf. Ayres-Bennett 1996: 4). They
do not represent the original language of the writer alone, but of copy
editors, printers and so on, who adapted the handwritten scripts to the
prescriptive norms of the time. It is evident that a view of standardiza-
tion limited to printed texts would overlook actual variation in written
language from the past.
(5) Traditional histories of language standardization – up until the 1980s –
often did not account for the potential roles of the broad range of text
genres and particularly of texts from oral registers, which emerged in
the modern period and have come down to us.
(6) From a sociological point of view, traditional histories of linguistic
standardization almost completely ignore the voice of the ‘common
people’. Rather than taking the productive role of non-elite writers
into serious consideration, it is tacitly assumed that the population at
large participated in standardization by merely adopting ‘the standard’
after its implementation was completed (cf. the ‘standardization from
above’ view, Chapter 2).

The most widely adopted standardization model comes from Einar

Haugen (cf. Chapter 1). Haugen developed two standardization models for
different purposes. In his seminal paper ‘Dialect, language, nation’ (Haugen

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 96 ST E P H A N E L S PA ß

1966), he described ‘four aspects of language development … in taking the

step from “dialect” to “language”, from vernacular to standard’, which are
‘(1) selection of norm, (2) codification of form, (3) elaboration of function,
and (4) acceptance by the community’ (Haugen 1966: 933). This model will
be referred to as Haugen’s ‘historical standardization model’ in this chap-
ter. In a later paper on ‘The implementation of corpus planning: theory and
practice’ (Haugen 1983), Haugen presented a modified model in which he
replaced ‘acceptance’ with ‘implementation’. This model, however, does
not primarily apply to historical standardization processes, but explicitly
refers to the context of language planning. Although Haugen’s historical
standardization model did not suppose a chronological sequence for these
four aspects (‘selection’, ‘codification’, ‘elaboration’ and ‘acceptance’),
they have often been portrayed as four sequential stages, thus conflating
Haugen’s model ‘with the common view of standardisation as a chrono-
logical process’ (cf. Pillière & Lewis 2018: 5). Haugen’s model has received
two main criticisms. Firstly, it has been characterized as being ‘rather
teleological’ (cf. Deumert & Vandenbussche 2003: 10). Moreover, it has
been criticized as neglecting the cultural-historical contexts, particularly
the embedding of the standardization processes in Europe into historical
nation-state discourses (Auer 2006: 339). In this regard, Haugen’s histori-
cal standardization model seems to be more suitable for describing stand-
ardization processes from above, but not so much for those from below,
and it appears to be neither comprehensive nor fine-grained enough for a
detailed account of particular standardization processes.
In short, both traditional historiographies and Haugen’s ‘historical stand-
ardization model’ focus on a certain version of standardization processes in
the past. One result of the heavily biased data selection in traditional histories
of linguistic standardization, due to both a ‘funnel model’ and a ‘tunnel view’
of language history, is that such stories include early dates for the comple-
tion of standardization processes. It has been maintained until recently, in
the case of German, that a standard had been achieved by the end of the eight-
eenth century (Elspaß 2005: 4, 2007: 3); in the case of Dutch, earlier in the eight-
eenth century (cf. Rutten & van der Wal 2014: 3); and in the case of English, at
the end of the seventeenth century (Watts 2012: 598). One particular problem
for standardization narratives which are based on a teleological perspective –
the standard language ideology and its intrinsic concept of homogeneity – is
that they can neither explain the presence of variation in today’s standards
nor their emergence, particularly the emergence of former ‘non-standard’
­variants into present-day standards (cf. the examples in Section 3.4.1).

3.2.2 A New Theoretical Framework: The Language History from

Below Approach
The ‘language history from below’ approach has evolved into a vibrant sub-
field of historical sociolinguistics (e.g. Elspaß 2005, 2015a, 2015b; Elspaß
et al. 2007; Schulte 2008; Knooihuizen 2011; Graser & Tlusty 2012; Nobels

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 Language Standardization in a View ‘from Below’ 97

2013; Rutten & van der Wal 2014; Puttaert et al. 2019) and research in neigh-
bouring fields (e.g. Edlund et al. 2016) in the new millennium. Essentially,
this approach advocates a major change of perspective in language history
in two respects (cf. Elspaß 2007). Firstly, from a sociohistorical point of
view, it entails a shift from the focus on the language use of experienced
writers (from the upper classes) to the language use of the lower ranks of
soci­eties, which accounted for the vast majority of the population. This
‘radical change of perspective from a “bird’s-eye” to a “worm’s-eye” view’
(Elspaß 2007: 4) coincides with the ‘New History from Below’ approach in
the historical sciences (cf. Hitchcock 2004) and, like the latter, it calls for
establishing ‘a new core which re-centres the historian’s angle of vision’
(Lyons 2012: 20). Secondly, the ‘language history from below’ approach
entails a different starting point of the description and explanation of lan-
guage in history: it is a shift from a focus on selected texts and text genres
in formal registers to a focus on ‘historical orality’ in informal registers, or,
in the terminology of Koch and Oesterreicher (2012 [1985]: 445–51), from
‘language of distance’ to ‘language of immediacy’. In linguistic terms, the
shift of ­perspectives to the view from below embraces an acknowledge-
ment of varieties and informal registers which are primary and fundamen-
tal to human interaction. Prototypically, such registers are represented by
speech in oral face-to-face interaction, and – in the context of the histories of
Western standard languages – by traditional dialects. In historical linguis-
tics, the possibility of accessing such varieties and registers is limited. There
is, of course, no direct access to spoken language data prior to the invention
of sound recording. ‘Orality’ from the past can only be reconstructed. For
the reconstruction of spoken dialects in the past, linguists had always had
to content themselves with methods from historical dialect­ology. For infor-
mal registers in written sources from the past, however, direct access to
relevant data is possible. Thus, from the very beginning of historical socio-
linguistics, scholars have recognized the possibility of exploring ‘historical
orality’ in particular text sources from the past (cf. Section 3.3).

3.2.3 Consequences for a View of Language Standardization

from Below
‘Language standardization from below’ may appear to be a contradiction
in terms, as it seems to be generally accepted that standardization is a ‘top-
down’ process, characterized by an intentional selection and codification
of language norms as well as an attempt to elaborate the functions of a
(standard) variety (cf. Section 3.2.1). In order to arrive at a full picture of
standardization processes, however, it seems reasonable to complement
the concept of ‘standardization from above’ with a view from below. There
are several aspects that are worth considering in this regard.

(1) Historical standardization could only start with varieties that had
already  arrived at a stage of ‘standards of usage’ (cf. Joseph’s 1987:
3–7 notion of ‘language standards’) in written form without a

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 98 ST E P H A N E L S PA ß

‘standardization from above’. To give an example, Low German in its

written form had arrived at a stage of an actual ‘standard of usage’ (and
was even a lingua franca in Northern Europe) by the sixteenth cen-
tury, but never reached the status of a standard language in the sense
of Haugen’s ‘historical standardization model’, because ‘it was never
codified or monitored’ (cf. Langer 2003: 297).
(2) To reconstruct processes from below – including changes from below
in the Labovian sense (cf. Section 3.1) – before the time of deliberate
standardization efforts from above has been one of the major objec-
tives of historical linguistics.
(3) Some standardization efforts from above were never widely accepted
by the speech community and have not effectively been put into
practice. In recent decades, research on the histories of Western lan-
guages in their standardization period (i.e. from the beginning of
the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century) has
focused on the relationship between standardization efforts (particu-
larly with respect to prescriptive norms) and actual usage (cf. Takada
1998; Rutten et al. 2014; Poplack et al. 2015, among others). In the
view of Haugen’s (1966: 935) ‘four factors of language development’
(selection, codification, acceptance and elaboration), it is the factor of
acceptance which has received the closest attention in this research.
The more that different texts from different registers and writers are
considered – including text sources alternative to those that were pre-
viously the focus of research – the more accurately the acceptance
of language forms in past societies (or in their different parts) can be
determined.
(4) A look at alternative text sources for standardization studies may help
us to understand on the one hand why some standardization efforts did
not succeed, and on the other hand why long-stigmatized forms could
prevail over prescriptive forms in actual usage (cf. the case studies in
Section 3.4).
(5) In particular, a view from below is justified when variants which had
been in usage for a long time but had gone unnoticed in standard-­
language codices and usage guides start to emerge and gradually spread
in standard-language texts. Such phenomena and developments may
even have constituted ‘blank areas’ (‘witte vlekken’; cf. van der Wal 2006)
for traditional standardization stories from above.
(6) It follows that a look into language standardization from below will
certainly not be limited to a focus on the development of ‘minimal
variation in form’ (Haugen 1966: 931) in today’s codified standard.
It will rather draw attention to as much ‘orderly heterogeneity’
(Weinreich et al. 1968: 100) in language history as possible, in order
to follow all possible paths to today’s standards, including the various
dead ends.

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 Language Standardization in a View ‘from Below’ 99

3.3  M
 ethodological Implications and a Model for Corpus
Analysis

The study of standardization processes relies on written text sources for

two reasons. Firstly, these are the only sources available – at least for the
time prior to the invention of sound recording (i.e. until the end of the
nineteenth century). Secondly, the written form of a language is ‘a signifi-
cant and probably crucial requirement for a standard language’ (Haugen
1966: 929; cf. also Haugen’s definition in Section 3.1). Hence, the fact that
only written sources are available poses no essential problem for stand-
ardization studies. These are not ‘bad data’ (Labov 1994: 11), but exactly the
mater­ial that is required for histories of linguistic standardization.
Joseph (1987: 19) pointed out that standard language was acquired
‘through instruction, correction, imitation, assimilation, acculturation – precisely
the ways in which one’s native dialect is not acquired’. This, of course,
holds for any form of written language that was learnt after the acquisition
of native speaker varieties, and it applies in formal as well as informal regis­
ters. However, texts in informal registers, particularly those in handwrit-
ten form and authored by non-elite writers, have mostly and systematically
been excluded from the study of standardization under the widespread
assumption that they represented ‘non-standard’ varieties (‘slang’, ‘patois’,
‘Umgangssprachen’, ‘tussentaal’, etc.). However, just as earlier standard forms
may be part of the non-standard today, early non-standard forms can now
belong to the standard. Accordingly, the existence of variation in the past
can also account for an explanation of standard variation in the present.
Thus, ‘any attempt to trace the trajectory of [allegedly] non-standard forms
must incorporate a method for detecting the existence of prior variability’
(Poplack et al. 2015: 14). This is why standardization studies in a view from
below call for sources of data that are different from most of the sources
which have been used so far to investigate standardization processes
(cf. Elspaß 2020).

3.3.1  Texts from Below

From the two dimensions of a language history from below outlined in
Section 3.2.2, it follows that texts from below are defined (1) as ‘oral’ texts
from the past and the present and (2) as texts by non-elite writers, and by
writers from the lower ranks of the societies, in particular.
The first aspect calls for a focus on texts which are ‘as close to actual
speech as possible, only in written form’ (Sević 1999: 340). Such texts
may be ‘speech-like (e.g. private correspondence), speech-based (e.g. trial
proceedings) and speech purposed (e.g. plays)’ (Nevalainen & Raumolin-
Brunberg 2012: 29, after Culpeper & Kytö 2010). Like ‘speech-purposed’
plays, ‘speech-based’ texts such as trial proceedings (e.g. the Old Bailey

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 100 ST E P H A N E L S PA ß

Proceedings, cf. Huber 2007; or proceedings of Early Modern witch trials,

cf. Macha et al. 2005) are usually written down by professional writers, such
as (as in these three cases) playwrights or chancellery writers. However,
as historical sociolinguists became increasingly interested in authentic
voices from the past and in allowing as many different voices as possible
to be heard, there developed a concentration on ‘speech-like’ texts. The
richest body of ‘speech-like’ texts from the past, written by members from
almost all layers of society, comes in the form of private letters, private
diar­ies and other ego-documents (cf. Elspaß 2012). Private letters were
often perceived by non-elite writers as a surrogate for personal conversa-
tion when this was no longer possible in times of war and migration. In
recent decades, vast volumes of such documents have come to light and
have been digitally edited and investigated in various research projects,
such as the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) (cf. Nevalainen &
Raumolinen-Brunberg 2003); the Letters as Loot Corpus with thousands of
(mostly private) Dutch letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries (Rutten & van der Wal 2014); the Corpus de français familier ancien (Corpus
LFFA) with more than 5,000 letters written in North America and in France
between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries (Martineau 2004);
the Corpus of Patient Documents (CoPaDocs); a corpus of both formal and infor-
mal letters and other personal documents written by patients from mental
hospitals in nineteenth-century Germany (Schiegg 2017–); or the CARDS
and the P.S. Post Scriptum projects, which house wide collections of private
letters from Early and Late Modern Portugal and Spain (cf. Marquilhas
2012; CLUL 2014). A great benefit of such letters for sociolinguistic investi-
gation is that from the senders (who are not always the actual scribes) are
known by their signatures, and the contexts and contents of the letters
provide valuable information on relevant variables for historical-sociolin-
guistic analysis, such as gender, age, education and personal networks. As
for the present, a wide range of corpora of spoken language (from formal
as well as informal registers) as well as corpora of ‘speech-like’ texts from
the World Wide Web have been created in recent decades. The Corpus of
Contemporary American English (COCA), to name only the largest freely avail-
able corpus of  English, contains an 88 million-word corpus of spoken
English (cf. www.corpusdata.org, accessed 19 February 2019). Moreover,
the Internet provides a plethora of ‘speech-like’ texts in chats, discussion
groups, blogs, etc. For instance, the 1.8 billion-word Corpus of Global Web-
Based English (GloWbE) and the same-sized Corpus del Español (Web/Dialects)
consist largely (i.e. about 60 per cent) of blog texts (cf. www.corpusdata
.org, accessed 19 February 2019).
The second aspect calls for a particular focus on texts written by ‘ordin­
ary folk’. In recent decades, considerable scholarly interest was directed
to texts from members of the lower socioeconomic ranks, such as farmers,
artisans, labourers, ordinary soldiers and housemaids. Until well into the

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 Language Standardization in a View ‘from Below’ 101

twentieth century, these groups formed the vast majority of the popula-
tion in today’s industrialized countries. Since Early Modern times, literacy
has no longer been a privilege of the elites. Although the writing abilities
of many ‘common people’ may have been limited, those who had learnt
to read and write were able to put pen to paper and write letters or short
texts for the needs of everyday life. Terms like ‘mechanically schooled
writers’ (e.g. Fairman 2012) or ‘peu-lettre´s’ (e.g. Martineau & Tailleur 2014)
have been used in the research literature to describe these large groups
of ­writers. Case studies for Early Modern cities such as Augsburg have
revealed not only a vast number of different documents, but also an aston-
ishing breadth of different text types, such as pasquils, private letters,
petition letters, fraudulent documents, witness statements, letters of sup-
port in court cases or passes in the form of short notes of different kinds
(cf. Graser & Tlusty 2012) produced by ‘ordinary’ citizens, thus displaying
not only notably high literacy rates, but also various ‘layers of literacy’
even among lesser-educated people (cf. Graser & Tlusty 2009). An unpre­
cedented boom of activity among writers from the lower strata of society
occurred at the end of the eighteenth century, when tens of thousands
of paupers were forced to write letters of appeal to authorities and when
millions of emigrants and soldiers had to write letters in order to main-
tain contact with their relatives and friends at home. The vast volumes
of pauper letters, emigrant letters and war letters from the eighteenth
to the twentieth centuries account for a large part of texts from below
which survive as the only accounts of the everyday lives of ordinary people
from that time. As for the present, the Internet, in particular, has provided
­writers from all walks of life with platforms to produce texts to a wider
public. Such platforms are being used widely, providing researchers with
an unparalleled amount of linguistic data from writers who do not belong
to the social and educated elite.
A third aspect which characterizes such texts as ‘texts from below’ is that
they are not edited according to prescriptive norms. This applies to most
handwritten texts in the modern period and in recent decades also to many
text genres in the ‘new media’, such as text messages, emails or blogs. As
Fairman pointed out repeatedly, the ‘ideology of Standardization’ has been
built on a preference for printed texts (Fairman 2015: 55). Until well into
the twentieth century, however, most texts (and until the late nineteenth
century all texts), even those which went into print, were handwritten first.
Well into the nineteenth century, learning to read printed and handwrit-
ten texts constituted two different practices and were often considered two
different skills (or ‘cultural techniques’; cf. Messerli 2000). In the process
of editing handwritten manuscripts, texts were changed according to the
prescriptive norms of their times. As a result, printed texts display less
historical written variation than autographs, or, in other words, they con-
ceal ‘normal’ variation in written usage. Similarly, present-day private and
semi-public texts on the Internet (e.g. private emails and posts in Internet

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 102 ST E P H A N E L S PA ß

forums) present much more variation than texts in online newspapers,

official documents, etc., on the Internet.

3.3.2  A Corpus Model for Standardization Studies

The ‘from below’ approach is intended to complement or even correct
trad­itional accounts of standardization. However, a strict view from below
would certainly be as one-sided as a strict view from above (cf. Fairman
2007: 42). Thus, in order to arrive at a full picture of standardization, pos­
sible developments from both perspectives must be taken into account.
Such an enterprise rests crucially on the design of corpora for standard­
ization studies. Most multi-genre corpora for the modern period, such as
the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), account for register vari­ation
by considering different text genres; some corpora, such as the German
Manchester Corpus (GerManC), also account for regional variation (Durrell
et al. 2012). Following Fairman (2012: 224), Elspaß and Niehaus (Elspaß &
Niehaus 2014, Niehaus & Elspaß 2018) argued for a consideration of formal
as well as informal texts from all ranks of society in standardization studies,
with the aim of arriving at the broadest possible picture of standardization
processes and to not only capture standardization processes from above,
but also from below. Thus, a corpus for standardization studies should seek
to account for the following four dimensions of variation and comprise cor-
responding texts (cf. also the ‘basic requirements for texts to be useful for a
variationist analysis’, as postulated by Schneider 2002: 7):

• Diaphasic variation: texts from different registers, ranging from formal

printed to formal handwritten to informal handwritten texts;
• Diastratic variation: texts from members of all ranks of society, measured
by class (if applicable) and/or breadth of schooling;
• Diatopic variation: texts from all countries and regions which were to be
‘roofed’ by a standard language at the end of the standardization period;
and
• Diachronic variation: texts from all phases of the standardization period,
divided up into successive intervals (e.g. decades, such as in the COHA, or
fifty-year intervals, such as in the GerManC).

If at all possible, such a corpus would also strive for a sufficiently balanced
number of texts from women and men to allow for an investigation of gen-
der-related variation. Multivariate analyses will be necessary to uncover
correlations between individual variables (e.g. between gender and school-
ing in the past). Some corpora, particularly extensive corpora of family let-
ters, also allow for historical network analysis (cf. Bergs’ 2005 study on the
fifteenth-century Paston Letters) and ‘third-wave’ sociolinguistic studies (cf.
Conde-Silvestre’s 2016 ‘“third-wave” historical sociolinguistic approach’ to
the fifteenth-century Stonor Letters).

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 Language Standardization in a View ‘from Below’ 103

3.4  C
 ase Studies for Standardization Processes from
Below

This section will present case studies for standardization processes from
below for four languages: German, Dutch, English and French.

3.4.1 German
In German, there is a long tradition of stigmatizing not only dialectal varie-
ties, but also certain variants in pronunciation, as well as lexical and gram-
matical variants, in spite of the fact that they constituted norms of usage
even in written German for centuries. The effect of this stigmatization was
that such variants were declared ‘bad German’ and eventually marked as
‘non-standard’ (cf. Davies & Langer 2006). However, some of these variants
have survived not only in non-standard varieties, but also in registers of
spoken German which are today considered ‘spoken Standard German’ –
a register largely modelled on the written standard (cf. Schneider et al.
2018) – and some other variants have even emerged or are currently emerg-
ing in written standard German. Two prominent examples are the case of
words accompanying the preposition wegen (‘because of’) and the am-pro-
gressive in German.
The preposition wegen shows variation between the genitive and the
dative case in nouns which it governs. The grammaticalization of wegen
from a noun to a postposition which takes the genitive case, then to a pre­
position taking the genitive case and finally to a preposition taking the
dative case was almost complete at the end of the eighteenth century.
However, this process was held up and went in the opposite direction
after the leading grammarian of the time, J. C. Adelung, had prescribed
the genitive in his highly influential school grammar (Adelung 1781: 349).
Subsequently, in nineteenth-century texts, particularly in printed texts,
composed by professional writers and members of the elite, the use of
the dative with wegen declined rapidly (cf. Sato 2015: 32–4). However, in
private letters by nineteenth-century writers from the lower and middle
ranks (usually people with elementary education only), the dative case
remained predominant (cf. Elspaß 2015a: 47–8). In present-day printed
Standard German texts, the genitive is still prevalent, but the dative is
widely used again – although with certain areal preferences – so that it has
been included as a variant in recent codices of Standard German (cf. Hennig
et al. 2016: 1012–13; Dürscheid et al. 2018).
Whereas the use of the dative case with the preposition wegen consti-
tutes an example of a re-emergence from texts from below, the rise of
the am-progressive in German is an example of a genuine standardiza-
tion from below. German verbs have no inflectional form for progressive
aspect. However, certain syntactic constructions have been identified as

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 104 ST E P H A N E L S PA ß

carrying aspectual meaning: most prominently constructions with the

inflected form of the auxiliary tun (‘do’) + full verb and with am (‘at’ + det
m/n) + full verb + an inflected form of sein (‘be’). Both constructions can have
a habitual and, more frequently, a progressive meaning, similar to the ver-
bal -ing forms in English. The am-construction in its progressive function,
commonly referred to as ‘am-progressive’, has become a widespread gram-
matical form in spoken German and also in written Standard German after
having surfaced in Standard German texts only a few decades ago (cf. Imo
2008: 164–70; Dürscheid et al. 2018). Historically, the am-construction can
be traced back to nineteenth-century ‘texts from below’ from the (north)
western parts of Germany (Elspaß 2005: 269–70), where it was supported
by frequent use in base dialects and spoken regional varieties (cf. Low
Franconian/Standard Dutch an’t/aan’t + inf + sin/zijn, Low German an’t + inf
+ sien/wesen), and to texts from Switzerland (Van Pottelberge 2004: 220–1).
These are the two areas from which the use of the am-construction has
spread out to virtually all other parts of the German-speaking countries and
where its grammaticalization seems to have progressed the furthest (cf.
Elspaß & Möller 2003–, www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/r10-f10abcd/, accessed
19 February 2019). There are indications that the rise of the am-construc-
tion is connected to the fall of the tun-construction, which for centuries had
been used to convey aspectual meaning in German (Elspaß 2005: 273–5).
In this scenario, the stigmatization of the tun-construction (Langer 2001)
by prescriptivists led to the decline of its use in formal written German,
and the ensuing loss of a grammatical means to express aspect may have
promoted the dissemination of an alternative grammatical construction.
The arrival of new text genres in the Internet and so-called social media,
such as blogs, discussion forums and chat rooms, has helped to popularize
the use of such constructions. For instance, whereas German Wikipedia
articles hardly contain any am-progressives and instances of the dative
with the preposition wegen, these constructions are frequently used in the
Wikipedia discussion forums, as can be seen from relevant sub-corpora
(wpd17 and wdd17) in the Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo, ‘Reference
Corpus of German’, accessed 19 February 2019).

3.4.2 Dutch
A particular case which can be considered a standardization process from
below can be seen in the Dutch spelling system. In modern Dutch spelling,
long vowels can be represented by a single vowel grapheme or a double
vowel grapheme, thus following a syllabic spelling system. Single vowel
graphemes are used in open syllables and double vowel graphemes in
closed syllables. This can result in two spelling variants for two forms of the
same root (e.g. ik slaap (‘I sleep’), zij slapen (‘they sleep’)). In the case of long e,
up until the seventeenth century, Dutch used to have two historically dif-
ferent phonemes: (1) old ‘softlong’ ē, which developed from a lengthened

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 Language Standardization in a View ‘from Below’ 105

short e or i in an open syllable, such as in leven (‘to live’) and ik leef (‘I live’) (cf.
German leben, ich lebe); and (2) old ‘sharplong’ ê, which developed from West
Germanic *ai, such as in heten (‘to be called’) and ik heet (‘I am called’) (cf.
German heißen, ich heiße) (cf. Rutten & van der Wal 2014: 35). With respect
to the spelling of e in open syllables, writers of seventeenth-century Dutch
either followed a ‘phonology-based’ spelling system, with <e> represent-
ing old ‘softlonge’ ē and <ee> representing old ‘sharplong’ ê (e.g. leven,
but heeten), or one of two new systems: the morphological system, which
ensured that word stems were written with the same vowel grapheme (e.g.
ik heet, zij heeten), or the syllabic principle (see above). In the southern Dutch
province of Zeeland, the phonology-based spelling tradition was backed
by a phonological distinction between ‘softlong’ ē and ‘sharplong’ ê in the
local dialects (which actually prevails in Zeeland dialects to the present
day). This spelling tradition developed into a supralocal norm which spread
from the south of the Dutch language area to the north, with the effect that
it ‘was widely used in published texts in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries’ (Rutten & van der Wal 2013: 104), and it eventually found its way
into the first official spelling codex of Dutch (cf. Siegenbeek 1804: 118–21).
However, it was not the historical but the syllabic spelling principle which
in the end has been adopted in the present-day standard of Dutch. The syl-
labic principle was backed by the merger of the two historically different e
phonemes in the northern dialects of Dutch, particularly in the Amsterdam
area, an area in which there would have been no spoken-language basis for
the historical spelling principle. With data from the Letters as Loot Corpus,
Rutten and van der Wal (2014: 71) demonstrate that not only did the syl-
labic principle become the dominant writing principle for the spelling of
long e in eighteenth-century Amsterdam, but that it also spread to other
areas. The letters thus demonstrate, firstly, the development of the syllabic
principle to a supraregional norm of usage and, secondly, its spread into
other areas in spite of other established spelling principles. To sum up, in
the case of e-spelling in Dutch, the rise of the syllabic principle constitutes
a standardization process from below.

3.4.3 English
There has been a widely held view that the standardization of English origi-
nated in the Chancery in the pre-eminent political and economic centre of
London and that the standard spread from the capital (Nevalainen 2003:
129–30, 132–4; Auer 2019). This seems to be confirmed for many phenom-
ena. However, in the study of fifteen grammatical features in Early Modern
English, three prominent features formed exceptions to this general trend
in that they constituted ‘incoming forms of northern origin: replacement
of the third-person indicative -th with -s, of the indicative plural be with are,
and of the determiners mine and thine with my and thy’ (Nevalainen 2014:
123). Except for the second-person singular informal pronoun thy, which

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 106 ST E P H A N E L S PA ß

was later replaced by your (along with you for thou), all northern variants
were to become the standard forms in English. (Thy, thou, etc., have only
been maintained in some northern English dialects.) According to the
data in the CEEC, on which the findings of Nevalainen and Raumolinen-
Brunberg (2003) are based, the English Royal Court was influential in the
diffusion of the new northern variants. However, these northern forms
were adopted by London merchants and first spread through correspond-
ence in the City. The standardization of the three northern grammat­
ical features can be viewed as a standardization process from below, as it
started off in (handwritten) documents from writers ‘below the elite’ of
the time. This example also demonstrates that even in a country with an
indisputable political and economic centre, not all standardization move-
ments necessarily originate in this centre. Consequently, recent historical
sociolinguistic research on the standardization of English has shifted its
focus from London to regional centres, such as York, Coventry, Bristol and
Norwich (cf. the project Emerging Standards: Urbanisation and the Development
of Standard English, c. 1400–1700, based at the University of Lausanne).
A more recent example is the use of to-infinitive clauses used in the com-
plementation of perception verbs in the active voice, such as ‘she saw him to
be defensive and it was hard to find speech’. According to Lacassain-Lagoin
(2018), the use of this construction with perception verbs is either explicitly
labelled as non-standard or not mentioned at all in many prescriptive as
well as descriptive grammars of contemporary English. Some other gram-
mars restrict the use of to-infinitivals to very few perception verbs, such as
feel, see, perceive, observe, which indicate inference rather than perception.
Based on her corpus study of different varieties and registers of English
in the British National Corpus (BNC), the COCA, the Strathy Corpus of Canadian
English (STRATHY) and the GloWbE, Lacassain-Lagoin found that this con-
struction is: (1) actually used with a range of perception verbs; (2) used not
only in cases which indicate inference, but also in instances which carry a
meaning of sensory perception; and (3) even used with agentive perception
verbs, such as listen to, watch or look at, which none of the consulted gram-
mars declared as ‘standard’. Lacassain-Lagoin interprets the results of her
corpus-based study of actual usage as an indication of an ongoing change
in Standard English (2018: 35–7). Moreover, as sub-corpora of Internet web-
sites showed higher rates of to-infinitivals than sub-corpora of spoken and
written English, she argues that ‘the Internet plays a leading role in the
current changes in the complementation of perception verbs’ (2018: 38).

3.4.4 French
French has a special reputation for being an extremely normative standard
language, since the Acade´mie française was established in 1635. Historical
sociolinguistic studies which looked into the relationship between pre-
scriptive norms and actual usage have shown that ‘prescriptive injunctions

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 Language Standardization in a View ‘from Below’ 107

have had little if any effect on usage’ in spoken French (Poplack et al. 2015:
49); these include rules such as the prescription of the imperfect (rather
than the conditional) in protases of clauses beginning with si (‘if’), of the
synthetic future form for future temporal reference or of subjunctive selec-
tion (Poplack et al. 2015: 44–8). As for written French, based on data from
eighteenth-century Canadian French, Martineau (2007) reports on the
interesting case of spelling variation between <ai> and <oi> (and to a lesser
degree <e>), such as in françois/français (‘French’), foible/faible (‘weak’) or
paroı̂tre/paraı̂tre (‘(to) seem’). The <oi> variant was the older, more conserva-
tive variant, associated with the pronunciation [wε] in the Ancien Re´gime; the
<ai> variant was considered the innovative variant, which eventually was
declared ‘correct’ in the sixth edition of the Acade´mie dictionary in 1835
and is still the standard variant today (Martineau 2007: 207–8; Pöll 2020).
In the Corpus LFFA, <oi> was favoured by most male writers from the elite
in ‘New France’ (i.e. ‘merchants and militaries of a higher social status’).
However, in Martineau’s study, merchants and militaries of a lower social
status and wives of these merchants and militaries showed a more frequent
use of the innovative <ai> variant – which later became the standard vari-
ant (Martineau 2007: 207–10). This may constitute another example of a
standardization process which did not originate in the linguistic usage of
the dominant social group of writers. A further example is change in word
order, in which a clitic pronoun changes from the position before a matrix
verb to the position before an infinitive (e.g. the change of le (‘it’) in Je le
veux faire to Je veux le faire (‘I want to do it’)). The first construction is older;
the latter construction is the standard variant in Modern French. In sev-
enteenth-century France, normative publications favoured the older con-
struction, although the newer variant had been dominant in actual usage
for decades – even in the translation texts of one commentator who, in his
theoretical writings, expressed a preference for the conservative variant
(cf. Ayres-Bennett 2014: 194).

3.5  Directions for Future Standardization Studies

In historical sociolinguistics in the new millennium, the call for alternative

language histories has shifted the focus of attention to possible standard­
ization processes from below. The concept of standardization from below
provides a long-overdue counterbalance to a research tradition of viewing
standardization solely as a ‘top-down’ process and neglecting the role of
broad layers of the population in such processes. While the key concept of
language standardization from above is implementation, the crucial aspects
of language standardization from below are conventionalization and accept-
ance of a linguistic variant or variety by members of a community, measured
by actual language usage in texts which are considered to be maximally dif-
ferent from their native dialects. Therefore, it can be argued that the most

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 108 ST E P H A N E L S PA ß

reliable way to establish the acceptance of a linguistic variant or variety by

a community is to look at actual language usage in texts from all registers,
from all regions and written by members of all layers of societies.
The integration of a view from below into a revised theory of standardiza-
tion entails an alternative approach to (1) corpora and agents of standard­
ization and (2) methods.

(1) While traditional studies on standardization have been based on a

small selection of (mostly printed) texts by a small selection of (mostly
educated) writers, alternative approaches have called for a substantial
extension of the textual basis. Principally, in a revised theory of stand-
ardization, all kinds of texts from all language registers and written by
members of all ranks of society need to be considered as potentially
contributing to language standardization processes. From this, it fol-
lows that existing ‘selective’ corpora must be complemented by texts
which have not been at the centre of standardization studies so far,
particularly texts from below (i.e. oral texts and texts by writers from
the lower ranks of society in the past).
(2) Methodologically, a revised theory of standardization must account
for language variation in both the past and the present: the object of
research must be expanded to incorporate all documented varieties
and variants. In particular, a new theory of standardization should
include varieties and variants which, in the normative tradition, had
previously been stigmatized as ‘bad’, ‘incorrect’, ‘colloquial’ or ‘vul-
gar’, or which had even been made ‘invisible’ in printed texts and in
metalinguistic sources of the time (cf. Havinga & Langer 2015). A spe-
cific challenge for the historical sociolinguist is to examine why certain
variants ‘from below’, such as the ones presented in the case studies in
this chapter, have managed to permeate into standard varieties while
others did not. If a historical sociolinguist wants to trace the ‘success
story’ of certain varieties and variants as well as the gradual disappear-
ance of others, or if s/he seeks to reconstruct the historical trajectories
of present-day variation, a systematic investigation into language vari-
ation in the past is essential.

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