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Standardization of English language

Introduction
The final major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press,
one of the world’s great technological innovations, introduced into England by William Caxton in 1476
(Johann Gutenberg had originally invented the printing press in Germany around 1450). As
mass-produced books became cheaper and more commonly available, literacy mushroomed, and soon
works in English became even more popular than books in Latin.
At the time of the introduction of printing, there were five major dialect divisions within England -
Northern, West Midlands, East Midlands (a region which extended down to include London), Southern
and Kentish - and even within these demarcations, there was a huge variety of different spellings. For
example, the word Church could be spelled in 30 different ways, People in 22, receive in 45, She in 60.
The Chancery of Westminster made some efforts from the 1430s onwards to set standard spellings for
official documents, specifying I instead of ich and various other common variants of the first person
pronoun, land instead of lond, and modern spellings of such, right, not, but, these, any, many, can,
cannot, but, shall, should, could, ought, thorough, etc, all of which previously appeared in many
variants. Chancery Standard contributed significantly to the development of a Standard English, and
the political, commercial and cultural dominance of the "East Midlands triangle"
(London-Oxford-Cambridge) was well established long before the 15th Century, but it was the printing
press that was really responsible for carrying through the standardization process.
Some of the decisions made by the early publishers had long-lasting repercussions for the language.
One such example is the use of the northern English they, their and them in preference to the London
equivalents hi, hir and hem (which were more easily confused with singular pronouns like he, her and
him). Sometimes different spellings were used for purely practical reasons, such as adding or omitting
letters merely to help the layout or justification of printed lines.
The period or full-stop was restricted to the end of sentences; semi-colons began to be used in additon
to colons (although the rules for their use were still unclear); quotation marks were used to mark direct
speech; and capital letters were used at the start of sentences and for proper names and important
nouns. The grammarian John Hart was particularly influential in these punctuation reforms.
Standardization was well under way by around 1650, but it was a slow process .

The Process of Language Standardization


Standardizing a language needs some interrelated steps (Holmes: 2001): selection: choosing the variety
to be developed; codification: standardizing its structural or linguistic features; elaboration: extended its
functions for use in new domains; and securing its acceptance: enhancing its prestige, for instance, and
encourage people to develop pride in the language or loyalty towards it.
Selection
Variability is a fact of life for almost all languages. There are different regional dialects, class dialects,
and situational varieties. Standardization represents an attempt to curtail, minimize if not eliminate this
high degree of variability.The easiest solution seems to be to pick (although not arbitrarily) one of these
varieties to be elevated to the status of the standard. One of the existing dialects is chosen for
standardization purposes. The chosen dialect is likely to be one spoken be the more powerful and better
educated groups living in or near the capital.
Codification
The norms and rules of grammar, use, etc. which govern the variety selected have to be formulated, and
set down definitively in grammars, dictionaries, spellers, manuals of style, texts, etc. The selected
dialect is provided with a written grammar and a dictionary, so that it can be used in official documents,
taught in schools and learnt by foreigners. An important document of codification is Dr Samuel
Johnson’s Dictionary (1755). Previous to Dr Johnson, the dictionaries were ‘hard word’ dictionaries or
bilingual dictionaries – and did not set out to record ‘ordinary’ English words.
Elaboration
Thus a standard language is often characterized as possessing ‘maximal variation in function, minimal
variation in form’. Where necessary, ways of talking and writing about technology and other
development need for modern education and commerce will be developed by an academy or language
bureau in the first instance it may be necessary to borrow or invent vocabulary lists.
Acceptance

The ‘acceptance’ by the community of the norms of the variety selected over those of rival varieties,
through the promotion, spread, establishment and enforcement of the norms. This is done through
institutions, agencies, authorities such as schools, ministries, the media, cultural establishments, etc. In
fact, the standard language comes to be regarded not just as the best form of the language, but as the
language itself (eg consider the claim that Mandarin is Chinese in Singapore). The other varieties are
then dialects, which tend implicitly to get stigmatised as lesser forms, associated with the not too highly
regarded people, who are seen as less educated, etc.
A standard language is the language which is taught in schools, which is taught to non-native speakers,
and which forms the basis for the language used in writing. It is the language which is usually spoken
by educated people and which is used in formal presentations such as newscasts and video narrations.
Grammar books used in schools and dictionaries usually describe the standard language and emphasize
the way people should speak and write.
It aims at ‘regularizing grammar’ it became more and more pronounced in the latter part of the
seventeenth century and completely dominated grammatical thinking in the century to follow, and not
‘grammatical thinking’ in the narrow sense only. The laying down of rules about acceptable usage was
now, and especially in the latter half of the eighteenth century, extended to all components of Standard
English.
Standard languages are the idealized forms of the language and differ from the non-standard form
which is usually uncodified and unwritten. Non-standard language is often used in daily conversation,
even among “educated” people.
Non-standard language, from a linguistic viewpoint, is just as good as standard language and serves the
needs of those who speak it.

STANDARDIZATION!!!

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