English Standardisation

STANDARDISATION

The main social determinants of linguistic variation can be said to be:
Geography
Gender
Age
Class
Race and ethnicity
Occupation
Ideology and politics


Prestige and Stigmatisation

The sociolinguist Roger Bell (1976: 147-57) has suggested several criteria by which the prestige or stigma in which the code is held can be measured. These are:

• Standardisation    :    Whether the variety has been approved by institutions, codified into a dictionary or grammar, or been used for prestigious texts (national newspaper, religious book, canonical literature).    
• Vitality    :    Whether there is a living community of speakers who used the code or whether the language is dead or dying (like Manx, Cornish, Latin, Tocharian)
• Historicity    :    Whether the speakers have a sense of the longevity of their code.   
• Autonomy     :    Whether the speakers consider their code to be substantially different from the others (compare the relative status of the Standard English / German with Standard English / Scots).
• Reduction    :    Whether the speakers consider being a sub-variety or a full code of its own right; whether it has a reduced set of social functions. For example, it might not have its own writing system (like Geordie or Scouse) or might have only a very reduced function (like a football chant accent).
• Mixture     :    Whether speakers consider their language to be 'pure' ( as do the French) or a mixture of other languages (as are creoles).
• ‘Unofficial’ norms    :     Whether the speakers have a sense of 'good' and bad varieties of the code, even if there is no 'official' codification in grammars and dictionaries.