Standard English

The Widening Debate

Tony Bex, Richard J. Watts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134653133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Standard English draws together the leading international scholars in the field, who confront the debates surrounding 'Standard English', grammar and correctness head-on.
These debates are as intense today as ever and extend far beyond an academic context. Current debates about the teaching of English in the school curriculum and concerns about declining standards of English are placed in a historical, social and international context. Standard English:
* explores the definitions of 'Standard English', with particular attention to distinctions between spoken and written English
* traces the idea of 'Standard English' from its roots in the late seventeenth century through to the present day.
This is an accessible, seminal work which clarifies an increasingly confused topic. It includes contributions from: Ronald Carter, Jenny Cheshire, Tony Crowley, James Milroy, Lesley Milroy and Peter Trudgill.

Part I

PERSPECTIVES ON THE
HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
OF ‘STANDARD ENGLISH’

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

The chapters which make up Part I have a common ground in that they are all concerned with the ways in which the concept of ‘Standard English’ has been ideologically constructed. This is a strand that runs through the whole volume, but it is here where these issues are most explicitly expressed and given a historical context. The authors are not necessarily in agreement as to the precise definition of the term ‘Standard English’, but they do share a common perception that standardisation is best seen as a process driven by spokespeople who have successfully articulated a particular set of social values. Necessarily, such social values are rooted in history which is why each of the following chapters has a historical dimension.

In Chapter 1, James Milroy teases out a number of interwoven strands in the development of what he calls the ‘standard language ideology’, paying particular attention to the ways in which it has been promoted, often indirectly, by linguists’ conceptualisations of language. There is a strong lay interest in maintaining certain standards of correctness through features of accent and grammatical forms. These features are often equated with the standard language, although they only represent a tiny proportion of the dialect and are often slightly antiquated. However, the stigma attached to using incorrect forms results in discrimination, and it is this interrelationship between linguistic form and social discrimination that enables us to refer to the conceptualisation of ‘Standard English’ as ideological in its nature. Linguists who attempt to resist the ideological underpinnings have been hampered by a set of research paradigms that have dominated linguistic study certainly during this century, and in varying forms in the preceding centuries. Milroy spells out both what these are, and how they are being challenged by new sociolinguistic research into language variation.¹

In Chapter 2, Richard J.Watts investigates the genesis of the debate about ‘Standard English’ by discussing the works of some eighteenth-century grammarians. Although the ‘complaint tradition’ has a long history, it was only in the eighteenth century that detailed codification of English grammar was undertaken. Watts demonstrates that the codification was driven by a desire to describe a very limited dialect, and to describe it from a predominantly prescriptivist perspective. His characterisation of these grammarians as a ‘discourse community’ is helpful in that it shows how they appealed to a set of common discursive practices, and ones particularly related to education. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu and Berger and Luckman, he demonstrates how these writers managed to achieve symbolic capital, such that their work became institutionalised. Two features that he comments on—and these quite clearly demonstrate the ideological bases of interests in the eighteenth century as represented by these writers—are their constant references to the classical languages and their concentration on proscription. Necessarily, a knowledge of Greek and Latin implied a degree of education. By relating the parsing of English with the parsing of Latin, an indirect appeal could be made to the status that accrued to those people who had received a classical education. Further, the frequent injunctions as to what usages should be shunned constructed a view of language as social behaviour. Where ‘good’ language is equated with ‘good’ behaviour and vice versa, it is a very small step to the position where the users of that dialect which is regarded as ‘good’ are perceived as worthy regardless of the values they actually espouse.

In Chapter 3, Hayley Davis advances the argument from the perspective of lexicography. Like Watts, she argues that the concept of ‘Standard English’ was largely developed in relation to the written language. In a similar way to Milroy, she points out how the concept has been successfully maintained in part because of certain theoretical confusions within academic linguistics and, in particular, the tradition deriving from Saussure’s seminal Cours de linguistique générale. (1922). She concentrates on the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a project which had its origins in the mid-nineteenth century. Although not appealing to the same theoretical concerns as Watts, her discussion of those involved in advancing this project suggests that they too could be regarded as a ‘discourse community’. Similarly, the status that the OED has achieved suggests that it, too, carries symbolic capital. The significance of the OED is twofold. On the one hand, it tends to freeze the language in that the meanings of words are no longer regarded as subject to human negotiation. Further, it indirectly fosters the view that ‘visible’ language (i.e. writing) is the template of language tout court. Her discussion also enables her to point out that the work of the lexicographers necessarily involved historical research, and that the OED is therefore a history of the language. However, as a history it contains the ideological biases of its compilers, one of which was that a ‘Standard English’ had always existed.

In Chapter 4, Tony Bex is less concerned with the history of standardisation than with the ways in which a group of influential writers maintained a set of language attitudes (and ideologies) throughout a significant part of the twentieth century. As with Milroy, he recognises that the usages that these writers’ handbooks discuss do not necessarily represent the standard dialect as a whole. Nevertheless, he suggests that their work helped to maintain the prescriptivists’ view of language standards. Although he does not argue this directly, he is interested in why these writers should have had so much more influence on the public’s perceptions of English than the writings of professional linguists. As with Watts, he appeals to Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic and cultural capital, and suggests that they were granted significance not merely for what they wrote, but also for who they were. Again, as with the grammarians and lexicographers discussed by Davis and Watts, it could be argued that they formed a ‘discourse community’, and a discourse community that was driven by very similar ideological concerns as those others. Although Bex concentrates on the contemporary representation of English within the different handbooks, he notes also their construction of a history of the language, a similar appeal to written forms and a slightly archaic classicism.

All of these chapters refer directly or indirectly to the close connections between ‘Standard English’ and pedagogy. Honey (1997) equates the dialect with a notion of ‘educatedness’, although he fails to spell out precisely what he means by this. Crowley’s chapter, which appears as an epilogue to this volume, brings these issues into sharp focus from a contemporary perspective. He recognises that the confusion over the definition of ‘Standard English’ is troublesome for professional linguists, but he also discusses the ways in which its use by Honey and his apologists serves to distort the arguments when they enter the public domain.

Note

1 Other research paradigms which can be usefully applied to the study of ‘Standard English’ are discussed in Part III.

1

THE CONSEQUENCES OF STANDARDISATION IN DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS

James Milroy

Introduction

Much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century linguistics has depended on the study of major languages that have been regarded as existing in standard, ‘classical’ or canonical forms. Languages such as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, and subsequently English, Spanish, French and others, have been widely studied and often admired for their alleged elegance, expressiveness, richness or sophistication. Yet, in reality, many of these have at various times been spread by fire and sword through substantial areas of the known world. Their ecological success has arisen, not from the superiority of their grammatical and phonological structures over those of other less successful languages or from the great poetry that has been composed in them—but from the success of their speakers in conquering and subduing speakers of other languages throughout much of known history. I will refer to these as ‘major’ languages solely in recognition of the large number of native speakers that they have and the wide dispersal of these speakers.

This does not, of course, make these languages either good or bad, for languages are not in themselves moral objects. One language may use verbs at the end of clauses and another in the middle, but it cannot be shown that one word-order is in some way superior—more virtuous, more expressive— than the other. Much the same can be said of phonological and lexical structures. Thus (and this is the position of most professional linguistic scholars), no moral judgement or critical evaluation can be validly made about the abstract structures we call languages. It is the speakers of languages, and not the languages themselves, who live in a moral universe.

Most of the comments made so far are uncontroversial among linguists, although not to many others (including, for example, Honey 1997), and it is partly for this latter reason that these basic points must be repeatedly made. What we are concerned about here is that the languages mentioned above can be said to exist in canonical forms that are legitimised. They exist at their highest level of abstraction in standardised forms, and these abstract objects are, in principle, uniform states. Yet, apparently paradoxically, all languages, including these major languages, are observed to be variable within themselves and not uniform at all, and they are also in a continuous state of change. For this reason the idea that languages can be believed to exist in static invariant forms may well be to a great extent a consequence of the fact that they have undergone a process of standardisation, and it is by no means clear that all languages are viewed by their speakers in this way. Strange as it may seem, there are places in the world where speakers do not seem to be conscious of belonging to a community of any particular language (see further below) and where it may not be entirely clear what language they are using (Grace 1991). Thus, the belief that a ‘language’ must exist in some authoritative, invariant form may not be a linguistic universal. This may also be partly attributable to the fact that languages native to language scholars themselves (which for that reason become important data-sources for linguistics) are typically languages that are viewed as existing in standardised or canonical forms. For these reasons, it should be borne in mind that if present-day English, for example, is viewed as having a canonical form, it does not follow that all languages at all times have been the same in this way, or even that speakers of the English language throughout history have been able to think of their native language in this way either.

What I am concerned with in this chapter are the consequences of the fact that these languages—including English—have undergone, and continue to undergo, the complex process that we refer to as standardisation, bearing in mind that although speakers believe in the existence of some canonical form, the language continues to vary and change. I want to consider two aspects of this. The first, which I shall consider only briefly, is the interaction between scholarly linguistic attitudes to language and the publicly expressed attitudes of non-linguists and critics of linguistics. The second arises from the first. It is that the consequences of standardisation are discernible in the attitudes of linguistic scholars themselves: their judgements as to what the object of description consists of have been influenced by their knowledge that a standard form exists in some abstract dimension and by some consequences of the ideology of standardisation. Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968) showed very eloquently how dependent linguistic theory had become on the idea that linguistic structures are uniform (when they are in reality frequently variable), and I am interested here in taking their argument a little farther. I want to consider how far this emphasis on unique invariant forms can be shown to be wholly or partly a consequence of standardisation—specifically a consequence of the fact that the languages most studied have been standard languages, and of the fact that when nonstandard varieties have been studied they too have often been studied as though they had invariant canonical forms. English dialectology, for example, has often concentrated on eliciting what are regarded as the ‘genuine’ dialect forms, and intrusions from outside have sometimes been treated as ‘contaminations’ of the ‘genuine’ dialect. Indeed, it is the ‘standard’ language that usually takes the blame for these intrusions (for examples of these tendencies see, among others, the collection in Wakelin 1972b).

One of the main assumptions I make in this chapter is that standard languages are fixed and uniform-state idealisations—not empirically verifiable realities. That is to say, if we study the speech of people who are said to be speaking a standard language, it will never conform exactly to the idealisation. It is also true that any variety delimited and described by the linguist is an idealisation, and that the usage of an individual speaker will not conform exactly to that idealisation. However, a standard language has properties over and above those of non-standardised varieties, the chief one of which is existence in a widely used written form. For this reason we have found it preferable (Milroy and Milroy 1991) to treat standard varieties as not being mere ‘varieties’ on a par with other varieties, even though in a strict non-evaluative linguistic sense that is precisely what they are. If, however, they are treated within a taxonomy of varieties and viewed in a dichotomy of standard/non-standard, important generalisations are missed that are acces...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Perspectives on the History and Ideology of ‘standard English’
• Part II Perspectives on the spoken language
• Part III Perspectives From Outside the Uk
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index