Standard and Non-Standard: The Future

The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, 2011

This article deals with grammaticalisation phenomena in non-standard varieties of the English language which are not found in spontaneous spoken varieties of Standard English. It aims to identify the wide range of interesting grammaticalisation phenomena to be observed in the non-standard (including contact) varieties of English. It investigates whether there are markedly different grammaticalisation patterns in spontaneous spoken non-standard varieties compared with what we know about (written and spoken) standard varieties of English and whether there are instances of grammaticalisation which operate on a global level in the Anglophone world.

International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 2020

Language Contacts Meet English Dialects: Studies in Honor of Markku Filppula, 2009

Lingua, 2005

2014

Handbook of English Linguistics, 2nd edition, 2021

2016

The growing variability in Europe’s standard languages has spawned widely shared accounts of destandardization, as well as premonitions of the death of the very idea of a standard language. In this paper, we propose an alternative to these views by demonstrating that the ‘classical’ standardness criteria (uniformity, prestige, codification) have become too narrow to define standard varieties in our Late Modern era of democratization and digitalization. Rather than rejecting these criteria as invalid, however, we revise them in function of contemporary standard language dynamics. Building on corpus data and (especially) experimental perception data, we will show (1) that the overt prestige which is typical of standard languages has extended to include other types of superiority (such as media cool or dynamism), (2) that the uniformity believed to manifest itself in the absence of variation can also surface as ‘perceptual harmony’ (an intuitive agreement on howmuch socially meaningful...

Written Communication, 2016

Although standard language ideologies have been well researched and theorized, the practices that lead to the reproduction and enactment of these ideologies deserve attention. Specifically, there remains a need to study language that both reveals reliance on standard language ideologies and perpetuates these ideologies within the field of writing studies, undermining the field’s efforts to challenge standard English’s ongoing privileged position. This article examines the role of language in perpetuating perceptions of standard English as linguistically neutral regardless of personal or field-wide views about linguistic equality and the value of linguistic diversity. Specifically, I describe the discursive practices of standard language ideologies—what I term standard language discourse—that allow for a positioning of standard English as normal, natural, non-interfering, and widely accessible. Finally, I explore how to resist or challenge this positioning.