Hello, all!

There is a claim in certain linguistic circles that "all dialects are 
equal" and that there is no dialect we could call Standard English. I 
have found the article written by Peter Trudgill, a recognized name 
in linguistics and especially sociolinguistics, very interesting and 
useful in the clarification of this matter. The article is long, and 
therefore I decided to select from it the most pertinent parts, but 
whoever is interested in the full document can find it on the web.

Eduard 

**************

Standard English: what it isn’t
(Tony Bex & Richard J. Watts eds. Standard English: the widening 
debate. London: Routledge, 1999, 117-128.)
 
Peter Trudgill
University of Lausanne

There is a reasonably clear consensus in the sociolinguistics 
literature about the term standardised language: a standardised 
language is a language one of whose varieties has undergone 
standardisation. Standardisation, too, appears to be a relatively 
uncontroversial term, although the terminology employed in the 
discussion of this topic is by no means uniform. I myself have 
defined standardisation (Trudgill, 1992) as consisting of the 
processes of language determination, codification and stabilisation. 
Language determination "refers to decisions which have to be taken 
concerning the selection of particular languages or varieties of 
language for particular purposes in the society or nation in 
question" (p.71). Codification is the process whereby a language 
variety "acquires a publicly recognised and fixed form". The results 
of codification "are usually enshrined in dictionaries and grammar 
books" (p.17). Stabilisation is a process whereby a formerly diffuse 
variety (in the sense of Le Page and Tabouret-Keller,1985) "undergoes 
focussing and takes on a more fixed and stable form" (p.70). 


It is therefore somewhat surprising that there seems to be 
considerable confusion in the English-speaking world, even amongst 
linguists, about what Standard English is. One would think that it 
should be reasonably clear which of the varieties of English is the 
one which has been subject to the process of standardisation, and 
what its characteristics are. In fact, however, we do not even seem 
to be able to agree how to spell this term - with an upper case or 
lower case <s> - a point which I will return to later, and the use of 
the term by non-linguists appears to be even more haphazard. 


In this paper, I therefore attempt a characterisation of Standard 
English. It should be noted that this is indeed a characterisation 
rather than a strict definition - language varieties do not readily 
lend themselves to definition as such. We can describe what Chinese 
is, for example, in such a way as to make ourselves very well 
understood on the issue, but actually to define Chinese would be 
another matter altogether. The characterisation will also be as much 
negative as positive - a clearer idea of what Standard English is can 
be obtained by saying what it is not as well as by saying what it is. 
My discussion of this topic will be both a sociolinguistic and a 
linguistic discussion. (But it will be specifically linguistic: the 
word "ideology" wil not appear again in this paper). And it will 
also, I hope, be informed by references from time to time to the 
nature of standard and nonstandard varieties in language situations 
beyond the English-speaking world.


Standard English is often referred to as "the standard language". It 
is clear, however, that Standard English is not "a language" in any 
meaningful sense of this term. Standard English, whatever it is, is 
less than a language, since it is only one variety of English among 
many. Standard English may be the most important variety of English, 
in all sorts of ways: it is the variety of English normally used in 
writing, especially printing; it is the variety associated with the 
education system in all the English-speaking countries of the world, 
and is therefore the variety spoken by those who are often referred 
to as "educated people"; and it is the variety taught to non-native 
learners. But most native speakers of English in the world are native 
speakers of some nonstandard variety of the language, and English, 
like other Ausbau languages (see Kloss, 1967), can be described 
(Chambers and Trudgill, 1997) as consisting of an autonomous 
standardised variety together with all the nonstandard varieties 
which are heteronomous with respect to it. Standard English is thus 
not the English language but simply one variety of it. 


There is one thing about Standard English on which most linguists, or 
at least British linguists, do appear to be agreed, and that is that 
Standard English has nothing to do with pronunciation. From a British 
perspective, we have to acknowledge that there is in Britain a high 
status and widely described accent known as Received Pronunciation 
(RP) which is sociolinguistically unusual when seen from a global 
perspective in that it is not associated with any geographical area, 
being instead a purely social accent associated with speakers in all 
parts of the country, or at least in England, from upper-class and 
upper-middle-class backgrounds. It is widely agreed, though, that 
while all RP speakers also speak Standard English, the reverse is not 
the case. Perhaps 9%-12% of the population of Britain (see Trudgill 
and Cheshire, 1989) speak Standard English with some form of regional 
accent.


It is true that in most cases Standard English speakers do not 
have "broad" local accents i.e. accents with large numbers of 
regional features which are phonologically and phonetically very 
distant from RP, but it is clear that in principle we can say that, 
while RP is in a sense, standardised, it is a standardised accent of 
English and not Standard English itself. This point becomes even 
clearer from an international perspective. Standard English speakers 
can be found in all English-speaking countries, and it goes without 
saying that they speak this variety with different non-RP accents 
depending on whether they came from Scotland or the USA or New 
Zealand or wherever. 

If Standard English is not therefore a language, an accent, a style 
or a register, then of course we are obliged to say what it actually 
is. The answer is, as at least most British sociolinguists are 
agreed, that Standard English is a dialect. As we saw above, Standard 
English is simply one variety of English among many. It is a sub-
variety of English. Sub-varieties of languages are usually referred 
to as dialects, and languages are often described as consisting of 
dialects. As a named dialect, like Cockney, or Scouse, or Yorkshire, 
it is entirely normal that we should spell the name of the Standard 
English dialect with capital letters. 

Standard English is however of course an unusual dialect in a number 
of ways. It is for example by far the most important dialect in the 
English-speaking world from a social, intellectual and cultural point 
of view; and it does not have an associated accent. It is also of 
interest that dialects of English, as of other languages, are 
generally simultaneously both geographical and social dialects which 
combine to form both geographical and social dialect continua. How we 
divide these continua up is also most often linguistically arbitrary, 
although we do of course find it convenient normally to make such 
divisions and use names for dialects that we happen to want to talk 
about for a particular purpose as if they were discrete varieties. It 
is thus legitimate and usual to talk about Yorkshire dialect, or 
South Yorkshire dialect, or Sheffield dialect, or middle-class 
Sheffield dialect, depending on what our particular objectives are. 
Standard English is unusual, seen against this background, in a 
number of ways. 


First, the distinction between Standard English and other dialects is 
not arbitrary or a matter of slicing up a continuum at some point of 
our own choice, although as we have seen there are some difficulties. 
This is inherent in the nature of standardisation itself. There is 
really no continuum linking Standard English to other dialects 
because the codification that forms a crucial part of the 
standardisation process results in a situation where, in most cases, 
a feature is either standard or it is not. 


Secondly, unlike other dialects, Standard English is a purely social 
dialect. Because of its unusual history and its extreme sociological 
importance, it is no longer a geographical dialect, even if we can 
tell that its origins were originally in the southeast of England. It 
is true that, in the English-speaking world as a whole, it comes in a 
number of different forms, so that we can talk, if we wish to for 
some particular purpose, of Scottish Standard English, or American 
Standard English, or English Standard English. (Bizarrely, the 
British National Curriculuim document suggests that American and 
Australian English are not Standard English!) And even in England we 
can note that there is a small amount of geographical variation at 
least in spoken Standard English, such as the different tendencies in 
different parts of the country to employ contractions such as He’s 
not as opposed to he hasn’t. But the most salient sociolinguistic 
characteristic of Standard English is that it is a social dialect. 


At least two linguists have professed to find this statement 
controversial. Stein and Quirk (1995) argue that Standard English is 
not a social class dialect because the Sun, a British newspaper with 
a largely working-class readership, is written in Standard English. 
This argument would appear to be a total non-sequitur, since all 
newspapers that are written in English are written in Standard 
English, by middle-class journalist, regardless of their readership. 
Stein and Quirk also fly in the face of all the sociolinguistic 
research on English grammar that has been carried out in the last 
quarter of the 20th century (see for example Cheshire, 1982). 
Standard English is a dialect which is spoken as their native 
variety, at least in Britain, by about 12%-15% of the population, and 
this small percentage does not just constitute a random cross-section 
of the population. They are very much concentrated at the top (or, as 
some would prefer, "the top") of the social scale. The further down 
the social scale one goes, the more nonstandard forms one finds. 


Historically, we can say that Standard English was selected (though 
of course, unlike many other languages, not by any overt or conscious 
decision) as the variety to become the standard variety precisely 
because it was the variety associated with the social group with the 
highest degree of power, wealth and prestige. Subsequent developments 
have reinforced its social character: the fact that it has been 
employed as the dialect of an education to which pupils, especially 
in earlier centuries, have had differential access depending on their 
social class background. 


So far we have not discussed grammar. When, however, it comes to 
discussing what are the linguistic differences between Standard 
English and the nonstandard dialects, it is obvious from our 
discussion above that they cannot be phonological, and that they do 
not appear to be lexical either (though see below). It therefore 
follows that Standard English is a social dialect which is 
distinguished from other dialects of the language by its grammatical 
forms. 


We have to make it clear, however, that these grammatical forms are 
not necessarily identical with those which prescriptive grammarians 
have concerned themselves with over the last few centuries. Standard 
English, like many other Germanic languages, most certainly tolerates 
sentence-final prepositions, as in I’ve bought a new car which I’m 
very pleased with. And Standard English does not exclude 
constructions such as It’s me or He is taller than me. 


Conclusion


From an educational point of view, the position of Standard English 
as the dialect of English used in writing is unassailable. (We should 
perhaps add, however, that it has nothing whatsoever to do with 
spelling or punctuation!) As far as spoken Standard English is 
concerned, we could conclude that the teaching of Standard English to 
speakers of other dialects may be commendable - as most would in 
theory agree, if for no other reason than the discrimination which is 
currently exercised against nonstandard dialect speakers in most 
English-speaking societies - and possible - which I am inclined, for 
sociolinguistic reasons (see Trudgill, 1975) to doubt. Either way, 
however, there is clearly no necessary connection at all between the 
teaching of formal styles and technical registers, on the one hand, 
and the teaching of the standard dialect, on the other.



References
Chambers, J. and Trudgill, P. (1997) Dialectology. 2nd edition. 
London: Cambridge University Press.
Cheshire, J. (1982) Variation in an English Dialect. London: 
Cambridge University Press.
Giles, H. (1973) Accent mobility: a model and some data. 
Anthropological Linguistics 15: 87-105.
Hudson, R. and Holmes, J. (1995) Children's use of spoken Standard 
English. London: School Curriculum and Assessment Authority.
Kloss, H. (1967) Abstand languages and Ausbau languages. 
Anthropological Linguistics 9: 29-41.
Labov, W. (1966) The social stratification of English in New York 
City. Washington: CAL.
Labov, W. (1972) Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University 
of Pennsylvania Press.
Le Page, R. and Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985) Acts of identity. London: 
Cambridge University Press.
Stein, G. and Quirk, R. (1995) Standard English. The European English 
Messenger 4.2: xxx 
Trudgill, P. (1975) Accent dialect and the school. London: Edward 
Arnold. 
Trudgill, P. (1992) Introducing language and society. London: Penguin.
Trudgill, P. and Cheshire, J. (1989) Dialect and education in the 
United Kingdom. In J. Cheshire, V. Edwards, H. Münstermann & B. 
Weltens (eds.), Dialect and education: some European perspectives. 
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. pp. 94-109. 
 

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