Standards and Attitudes

Chapter 2 introduced the standard language and Chapter 5 showed how prestige works. This chapter asks three linked questions: how does a variety become the standard, what happens to people whose speech is not the standard, and can anyone plan a language on purpose?

How a Standard Is Made

Wikipedia defines a standard language as "any language variety that has undergone substantial codification" in grammar, lexicon, writing system or other features. It has the highest status or prestige among related varieties, especially in formal public and academic settings.

• The sequence. A variety is selected, often toward greater uniformity, and accepted by influential people. It spreads socially and culturally, is "established in opposition to competitor varieties", and is maintained, used in more contexts and given high status by its association with successful people. Standardisation is continual, because language keeps changing. (This matches the steps in Chapter 2; the page itself does not name formal stages.)
• The tools. Grammar books, dictionaries and reference works stabilise spelling and codify usages and meanings. Broadcasting uses the standard as a normalising reference, and education shapes the version taught to non-native learners. Codification can slow change.
• Who gets standardised. Varieties tied to commerce and government, used by educated people and in news broadcasting.

Two routes

Where standards came from

• British English is based on the language of the medieval court of Chancery.
• Italian derives from Florentine Tuscan; Greek is based on Southern dialects.
• Standard Chinese was adopted in the 1930s, with Beijing pronunciation.
• Serbo-Croatian has four standard variants sharing Štokavian as their dialect basis; Hindi–Urdu has two standardised registers with legal status in India and Pakistan.
• Brazilian Portuguese is described as a de facto spoken standard, with distinct norms in Africa and Europe.

Attitudes and Discrimination

The Linguistic discrimination article (also glottophobia, linguicism, languagism) defines it as "the unfair treatment of people based upon their use of language", including first language, accent, vocabulary, modality and syntax. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas described linguicism as "ideologies and structures used to legitimize, effectuate, and reproduce unequal divisions of power and resources" between groups defined by language. The page defines linguistic ideology as the belief that how a person speaks can signal social status.

The page also mentions the 1977 Ann Arbor case on AAVE and education, Michele Gazzola's study of EU multilingual policy (51% to 90% of people excluded under an English-only policy in 24 countries), and treaties giving minority children a right to use their own languages.

Language Planning

The Language planning article calls it "a deliberate effort to influence the function, structure or acquisition of languages" within a speech community.

Outcomes the page reports

• Hebrew in Israel: cited as vernacularization, an indigenous language restored and adopted as official (no further detail given).
• Ireland: after independence in 1922 the Gaelic League pushed for Irish to be taught at least an hour daily in primary schools. The effort lost strength: implementation was left to individual schools, there was no consensus on method and no assessment system. Native speakers have declined steadily.
• Peru: Quechua was declared official "coequal with Spanish" in 1975, reversed about four years later; the 1979 constitution made Spanish the sole official language.
• Vocabulary: Hungarian mostly coined words internally and Japanese borrowed heavily from English (both cited as successes); Hindi and Arabic are cited as failing to expand their lexicons adequately.

A planned language: Esperanto

• Origin. L. L. Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist from Białystok, created it in the late 1870s and early 1880s and published the first grammar book, Unua Libro, on 26 July 1887 as "Doktoro Esperanto".
• Aim. An easy, flexible universal second language to support "world peace" and international understanding and build a "community of speakers".
• Design. A constructed language between naturalistic and a priori design; about 80% of its vocabulary comes from Romance languages, with Germanic, Greek and Slavic elements.
• Speakers. The article says usage figures are difficult to establish: estimates of second-language speakers range from about 30,000 to 2 million (Culbert about 2 million; Wandel above 2 million; Vendelbo 30,000–180,000). Native speakers (denaskuloj) are given as about 1,000 (2022) in the infobox but about 2,000 in the lead, which is inconsistent.
• Standing. The first World Esperanto Congress was in Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1905 and the event is now annual. No country has adopted it officially. In 1954 UNESCO supported it in the Montevideo Resolution, but it is not one of the UN's six official languages.

Try It Yourself