Standardization

Abstract

Standardization is a type of sociolinguistic change that has significantly affected the history of early and late modern Europe. As a historical phenomenon, it has emerged in specific social and political circumstances, namely the state‐formation and nation‐building processes characteristic of early and late modern Europe. As a language ideological phenomenon, standardization aims to rearrange the diaglossic repertoires of historical language communities into a standard vs. non‐standard dichotomy. The standard language ideology is most clearly discernible in codification, which defines correct and incorrect language use. The implementation of correctness, and particularly the influence of codification on language use, have been extensively studied. In general, codification is not likely to affect language use, except in cases of strict top‐down implementation and institutional control. One reason is that codification itself is a variable phenomenon with different goals and target audiences across texts, communities, and time. Standardization and codification usually operate on previous instances of supralocalization, that is, supralocal writing conventions. Furthermore, the variants selected in codification do not always disseminate unidirectionally to language use. The selection of variants for the standard is therefore a phenomenon that needs to be primarily studied with sociolinguistic theories and methods, and without prior assumptions about the importance of explicit norms and of ideas about correctness. Finally, standardization is not restricted to one language or language area, but always takes place in a situation of historical multilingualism, in which vernacularization is not necessarily a first step toward standardization.

Authors 1

1. Gijsbert Rutten corresponding Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University, The Netherlands