Tiêu đề A3 - STANDARD LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY IN THE ANGLOPHONE WORLD ✅

A3. STANDARD LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY IN THE ANGLOPHONE WORLD I. STANDARD LANGUAGE ● Standard language is the term used for the variety of a language considered the norm. ● Optimum for educational purposes. ● Used as a yardstick against which other varieties of the language are measured. ● Prestige variety. ● Spoken by a minority of people occupying positions of power. ● Milroy (2001: 532): “Varieties of language do not actually have prestige, but acquire prestige when their speakers have high prestige”. II. LANGUAGE STANDARDS ● The prescriptive language rules constituting the standard. ● Members of a language community are urged to conform during education ● These rules: ○ Are subject to change over time. ○ Change in progress seen as errors by ‘standard language ideologists’ ⇒ the subject of much criticism from self-appointed guardians of ‘correct’ usage. ● Example: The Queen’s English Society ○ Was founded in 1972. ○ Whose aims “to improve standards of English, to encourage people to know more about our wonderful language, to use it more ef ectively and to enjoy it more as well as “exposing poor English standards”. ● INCLUSIVE STANDARDS ○ Language standards don’t function in the interests of certain groups, esp. Speakers of new Englishes. → Standards should be more inclusive (Parakrama, 1995, p.71). → The existence of standards cannot be denied. ○ Viable options? ■ Work towards broadening standards to include the greatest variety possible. ■ Even ‘uneducated’ usage that’s been considered inappropriate. III. STANDARDIZATION ● Stages of standardization (Haugen, 1966)
1. SELECTION ● Most critical stage: one variety, but not the other, is chosen to be developed as the standard language. ● Often, this is an existing variety that already has political and/or economic currency. ● The process could involve the selection of features from several varieties or even of a language variety that has no native speakers (Classical Hebrew). ● Selection is a social and political process: ○ Led by those in power. ○ Reinforces and further promotes their interests over others. 2. CODIFICATION ● Once selection has taken place, the variety chosen to represent the standard has to be ‘fixed’ in grammar books and dictionaries so that those people who wish to use the language ‘correctly’ have access to its standard forms. 3. ELABORATION OF FUNCTION ● Capable of performing a wide range of institutional and literary functions particularly, though not exclusively, in government, law, education, science, and literature. ● New lexical items are added and new conventions developed to fill any gaps. 4. ACCEPTANCE ● Selected variety has to be accepted by the relevant population. ● Unlikely to be an issue: Those who select the variety are already the one in power and thus can influence this process. ● Consequences: ○ Those who already lack power to decide will eventually become inferior and so will their variety ⇒ a social, regional, or ethnic dialect. ● The standard variety, as Hudson (1996: 33) says, "serves as a strong unifying force for the state, as a symbol of its independence from other states ... and as a marker of its difference from other states". ● On the other hand, it is quite possible that in times to come, there will be challenges to the ‘accepted’ variety from those both within and outside its users. 5. END POINT OF STANDARDIZATION ● The on-going nature of the process is most obvious in relation to codification and elaboration, with frequent elaboration of a language in line with its users’ new needs (e.g. technological vocabulary) leading to further codification.
● Oxford Dictionaries adds approximately 150 million words a month to its central database of English usage examples → around 1000 are added to Oxford Dictionaries Online each year. (e.g. google, selfi PRACTICE ⇒ C ⇒ B
⇒ B IV. WHAT IS STANDARD ENGLISH? ● 7 definitions - page 24-25 1. The dialect of educated people throughout the British Isles. ⇒ Normally used in writing, for teaching in schools and universities, and heard on radio and television. ⇒ Trudell (1984): A set of grammatical and lexical forms typically used in speech and writing by educated native speakers, including colloquial and slang vocabulary as well as swear-words and taboo expressions. 2. The variety of the English language which is normally employed in writing and normally spoken by ‘educated’ speakers of the language. ⇒ It is also, of course, the variety of the language that students of English as a Foreign or Second Language (EFL/ESL) are taught when receiving formal instruction. ⇒ The term Standard English refers to grammar and vocabulary (dialect) but not to pronunciation (accent). (Trudgill and Hannah 1982, and repeated in the fourth edition, 2012) 3. Standard English can be characterized by saying that it is that set of grammatical and lexical forms which is typically used in speech and writing by educated native speakers (Trudgill 1984). 4. Standard English is potentially misleading