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. To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/