Course materials © for/by Peter L. Patrick.

May contain other copyrighted material used

for educational purposes. Please respect copyright

Here are some notes drawn from the readings, including Mesthrie et al. 2000, Wardhaugh
2002 and Milroy & Milroy 1999. They're filtered through my own views, but most ideas are
not original. Please consult & cite the original works, too.

http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lg/lg232/Standards.html

Standard Language & Prescription

Notes for LG 232 by Peter L. Patrick

Consider the relation of the technical terms language, dialect, accent, variety:

Variety a neutral term: any linguistic system with cohesive distribution in social space

Accent: subordinate variety of a language differing principally in phonology (pronunciation)

Dialect: subordinate variety of a language.

o Dialects are historically related to a superordinate language,

o but may differ from it on 3 linguistic levels (phonology, syntax & lexicon);
o they are also regionally or socially bounded.
o A Dialect is a single norm of usage.

Special sense of sub-/superordinate: not social values, membership in linguistic family.

Scientifically speaking, all linguists agree that there is NOTHING INFERIOR about any
dialect compared to any other member of its language family – judgements about
superiority/inferiority on aesthetic, moral, expressive or social grounds are simply
prejudices, with no scientific basis in truth. (Similarly, there is no basis for judgments which
discriminate between different language families as somehow “worse” or “better”.)

Language: (a) a single linguistic norm, or

(b) a group of related linguistic norms.

(Definition by Einar Haugen. Haugen means norm in sense #1 below.)

Norms is used with several senses in sociolinguistics. The key meanings both stress the
notion of agreement within a social group:

1. practice, or custom, a behavior pattern; how things are said in a certain

community
2. values: the set of social values or beliefs used to justify, uphold or enforce that
practice.

Two lesser senses of the term Norms are worth distinguishing from these.
 1. Chambers & Trudgill refer to NORMs (Non-mobile Older Rural Males) as
typical subjects of traditional dialectology.
2. Shopen & Wald use "norm" the way most sociolinguists use "variant", to refer
to one of the possible choices in a linguistic variable (more later). I find this
usage confusing and don't recommend following it.

Prescription: the imposition of norms of usage by authority.

We'll distinguish this from standardization.

We're also going to look at language discrimination, on the basis of standards and
prescription.

o Linguistic differences are associated w/class, religious, gender, ethnic etc.

differences.
o Discrimination on the latter grounds is no longer publicly acceptable, but
o Discrimination on the grounds of accent, dialect, etc. is tolerated.
o If attitudes to language stand for attitudes to speakers, then it follows that:
o Discrimination on the grounds of language use stands in as a proxy for
discrimination on social grounds, and naturalizes and legitimizes it.
o I.e. one can openly discriminate against lower-class, foreign or ethnic students,
job candidates, etc. by means of language discrimination, while avoiding
direct (and possibly illegal) reference to class, ethnicity, or nationality.

Most linguists claim that linguistics is Descriptive and not Prescriptive, thus prescription is
not a part of the discipline and need not be studied.

• This has led to neglect of sociolinguistic issues involved w/prescription. Also,

• This attitude has had no effect on the general public, teachers, etc., who continue to
think in prescriptive terms and to believe that this is natural and logical.
• This goes hand in hand with the belief that preference for a standard language
variety is natural and logical, and has no negative social consequences.
• Sociolinguists advocate recognizing that value judgments are normally attached to
all language varieties by all speakers -- and that this attachment of values can be
socially motivated (often in unfair ways, or due to social power & discrimination), or
sometimes have no logic to it at all.
• What you don't find is a universal logic supporting the claim that standard languages
are better than other languages. They are not.

Standardization: of a language involves

o the suppression of optional variability in language forms and rules.

This means choice of a particular form as acceptable -- a choice that is a social convention --
and the convention that other forms are not, or less, acceptable (e.g. ain’t). The kinds of
values that we investigated in the language attitudes lecture are then attached to all the
variants: positive ones for the standard, negative ones for non-standards.
One of the tasks of sociolinguistics is to explain why and how this attachment of values
takes place. No-one claims it is a conscious conspiracy of the elite! It's rather mysterious, yet
the evidence that it has occurred is very clear.

It's also true that most people show preferences for non-standard variants in certain
circumstances -- that is, these values are not absolutely good/bad, but rather are relative to
appropriate situations and social contexts. (Compare newsreaders to sports announcers on
the same television channel -- broad or non-RP accents, and dialect or non-standard
expressions and colloquialisms, are much more likely in the latter.)

That the assignment of social value is arbitrary can be shown by looking at the "same"
variants in different communities:

post-vocalic (R) in NYC vs in Reading (Romaine 1994, p.70)

Thus, standard languages are not identical to non-standard ones in general linguistic terms:
they show less natural variation. They are in fact unnatural, social creations. Like all such
social conventions, they tend to favor one group, process or category over others.

Sociolinguists have never advocated that standard languages should not be taught. We
usually support the teaching of literacy and speech in standard languages in schools.

However, we also support the use of non-standard varieties, including accents and
dialects, in appropriate circumstances, and the right of speakers to choose which variety
they will speak in without being penalized for it.

There are perfectly good reasons behind the development, use and teaching of standard
languages. However they are social reasons.

• Standardization is a historical process which is always in progress.

• A standard is an ideology, abstract, not a particular set variety.
• Standards are abstract norms to which actual usage more/less conforms.
• Think of Standardization in weights & measures & money: lack of variation ensures
reliability & confidence in exchange.
• Standardization occurs in spelling, pronunciation, word-meaning, word-forms (he
does/do), sentence structure conventions.
• The ideology of standardization blinds us to fact that a 'standard language' is not
really very well-defined.
• Stages: the need for uniformity is felt;
o A variety is selected;
o It is accepted by influential people/institutions;
o It is diffused geographically and socially (thru e.g. newspapers, education, a
writing system, discrimination);
• Then it becomes established.
• Now it must be maintained against competitors,
• chiefly thru Elaboration of Function, the second characteristic of a Standard
language.
• This gives it increased value and function: vocabulary is created or borrowed,
technical terms are established and connected with prevalent ideas, works of literature
 are created and valued and taught, social identity is invested in it, history & religion
are connected with it, etc.
• Also, it acquires social prestige thru use by the powerful and wealthy.
• A writing system and literacy are modelled on it exclusively, and ...
• Speech is confused with and modelled on writing, which is less variable, and...
• It is taken to be the most logical and valuable form of language because of the other
connections with written products.
• Thus Public Consciousness of a standard is created and maintained.

Linguistic Register
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/messeas/regrep/node2.html

The concept of linguistic register has been described by Trudgill (1983:101) as follows:

Linguistic varieties that are linked ... to occupations, professions or topics have been termed
registers. The register of law, for example, is different from the register of medicine, which
in turn is different from the language of engineering---and so on. Registers are usually
characterized solely by vocabulary differences; either by the use of particular words, or
by the use of words in a particular sense.

Registers are simply a rather special case of a particular kind of language being produced by
the social situation.

Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens (1964) devote a long section to register in their 1964 work.
They also refer to register as `distinguished by use.'

I would suggest an improvement on Trudgill's definition by expanding the definition of

register to include, in many cases, a preference (or even a dispreference) for particular
syntactic patterns or rhetorical devices.

A close examination of many different kinds of registers shows that they tend to prefer or
eschew

• the passive voice;

• the APA recommends using Active voice: As a general rule, use the active voice
rather than the passive voice. For example, use "We predicted that ..." rather than "It
was predicted that ..."
• metaphors ( APA warns against them!)
• imperative verbs;
• sexist or racist language;
• short sentences

as well as having a preference for certain lexical devices (such as acronyms or blends) as well
as certain more established lexical items and resources, such as Greco-Latin vocabulary
(western European languages) or other classical languages, e.g. Sanskrit or Chinese.
When I say `registers prefer' etc. I mean, of course, that decision-makers who control the
standards of the register prefer or disprefer, and may explicitly state these preferences in
style-manuals for various journals, etc. Some researchers have noted that register is related to
uses rather than users. Scherer and Giles (1979:51-3) devote two pages to a description of
both differences in lexicon and the `complex, unusual semantic relations amongst
perfectly commonplace words' found in certain registers.

Example: While traveling by air to another city recently, I overheard two people next to me
discussing an issue in their discipline, which turned out to be high-energy physics. One man
kept using the word 'quench' in a way I had never heard used before. In a lull in their
conversation I interrupted and asked about this usage, explaining that I was a linguist. They
explained that in their register, it meant rapidly decrease the temperature of a hot gas. My
own understanding of this word was more like 'put out a fire; alleviate a person's thirst.'
Let us tentatively propose the following definition of Register:
A set of specialized vocabulary and preferred (or dispreferred) syntactic and rhetorical
devices/structures, used by specific socio-professional groups for special purposes. A register
is a property or characteristic of a language, and not of an individual or a class of speakers.

Crucial for our discussion of register in the context of multilingualism and language policy is
the fact that some languages lack certain registers: in western industrial societies they may
lack ethno-scientific registers (folk taxonomies for classifying plants, animals or natural
phenomena), or specialized poetic registers, specialized politeness systems, or registers for
speaking in a trance.

I use this example because of a situation that arose during my observation of a Toda
ritual in the Nilgiris District, Tamilnadu, India. A shaman went into a trance and
began devining the future. Although I did not understand any Toda, the speech of the
shaman while in a trance was to me impressionistically quite different from samples
of Toda I had heard up to that point. One frequent sentence-final utterance, delivered
with rising intonation [ariyo: ] sounded like a possible borrowing from Malayalam,
with the probable meaning `do you know?'. I asked the Toda informant guiding us
what the utterances meant, and he explained them without hesitation. But when I
asked him to repeat some of the words, he said that he couldn't say those words unless
he was in a trance.) Toda also has a register for songs that is phonologically so
different from spoken Toda as to be unrecognizable to someone who only knows
spoken Toda (Emeneau, personal communication).

This illustrates how even a numerically small and preliterate language like Toda may have
three registers that are so different linguistically that they constitute separate and mutually-
unintelligible codes, i.e., the existence of complex registers is not just a characteristic of post-
industrial western languages.

In pre-industrial societies the languages lack legal, technical, scientific, and medical registers
and subvarieties of these (for example, the register that airline pilots use to communicate with
air traffic controllers). Such languages either function without such registers, which relegates
them to a marginal status within a larger multilingual society (Stewart's `g' [group] function),
or the members of such linguistic cultures acquire proficiency in these registers in other
languages. In many postcolonial societies, of course, the registers they acquire proficiency in
are registers of English or another ex-colonial language.
What this illustrates, of course, is that registers for a particular language may be di- or even
tri-glossic: certain registers are in the domain of the H variety (religion, literature, ethno-
history), some in the domain of the L-variety (conversation, jokes/stories, intimacy/courtship,
auto-mechanical, building/construction trades etc.) and certain registers (high-tech, higher-
education) may be in the domain of a totally different language.

Harold Schiffman
Wed Jan 29 12:05:21 EST 1997

Translation & Language Varieties

by Magdy M. Zaky

http://translationjournal.net/journal/17theory.htm Volume 5, No. 3 July 2001

he concept of language varieties in general, and language registers in particular, can

be of great help in translating as well as in evaluating translations.

It will be useful sometimes to refer to considerations of

Words are only register. Since the concept of a "whole language" is so broad
minor elements in and therefore rather loose, it is not altogether useful for many
linguistic purposes, whether descriptive or comparative. In
the total linguistic other words, the concept of language as a whole unit is
discourse. The theoretically lacking in accuracy, and pragmatically rather
useless. Consequently, the need arises for a scientific
particular tone of classification of sub-language or varieties within the total range
the passage, i.e, the of one language.
style of the These varieties, or sub-languages, may be classified in more
language, may than one way. The suggested classes include idiolects, dialects,
registers, styles and modes, as varieties of any living language.
have more impact Another view is that of Pit Coder (1973), who suggests
on the audience dialects, idiolects, and sociolects. Quirk (1972) proposes
region, education, subject matter, media and attitude as
than the actual possible bases of language variety classification of English in
words. particular. He recognizes dialects as varieties distinguished
according to geographical dispersion, and standard and
substandard English as varieties within different ranges of education and social position.
Language registers are recognized as varieties classified according to subject matter. We
acknowledge varieties distinguished according to attitude, which are called "styles," and
varieties due to interference, which arise when a foreign speaker imposes a grammatical
usage of his native tongue upon the language, which he is using. For example, a Frenchman
might say "I am here since Friday." This is lexically English, but grammatically French.
Another way of classifying language varieties is according to the user or the use of language.
Thus, in the first category, we may list social dialects, geographical dialects, and idiolects,
whereas the second category includes language registers.
The total range of a language may be described in terms of its grammatical, phonological,
and sometimes even graphological systems. Similarly, the language varieties of any given
language have certain linguistic features in common. These common features of all the
varieties of one language constitute the common core of that language. Apart from this
common core of the language concerned, there are other lexical. grammatical, and stylistic
features of each individual language variety, and so these could serve as formal linguistic as
well as stylistic markers of the language variety in question. It may be worth noting in this
respect that these variety markers may exist on any level: phonetical, syntactical, stylistical
and, above all, lexical levels.

Finally, according to Nida, (1964), one of the most serious problems that face a translator is
to properly match the stylistic levels of two different languages. For example, the Bible
translator may not select a level of language which is too high for making the message
accessible to the people to whom it is addressed. At the same time, the level chosen should
not be socially low, becasue it would then debase the content. In some parts of the Arab
world, colloquial forms of the language are quite unacceptable for the translation of the Bible,
although they might be better and more widely understood by people than classical Arabic.
On the other hand, the translator has to select not only the appropriate style for the Bible in
general, but for the particular biblical style he is translating, since the Bible contains more
than just one style. Translating in fact involves more than finding corresponding words
between two languages. Words are only minor elements in the total linguistic discourse. The
particular tone of the passage, i.e, the style of the language, may have more impact on the
audience than the actual words. Indeed, style and tone are of great, almost fundamental,
importance when we translate literary texts rather than scientific ones. If the aim of the source
language text is only to convey a piece of information or some instructions to the reader or
audience, the referential meaning of words becomes quite significant, and the effect of style
and/or tone diminishes. At the other extreme, when we deal with a source language text that
does not only aim at conveying a message, but aspires to produce a certain impact on the
reader through the use of a particular style, the translation of such a stylistic effect is then an
essential part of the very act of translating— not just as an ornament that would bestow
beauty upon the translated version, but as an indispensable aspect of it, without which the
translation ceases to be a translation in the full sense of the word. This is the case with the
translation of the holy books in general, and the Holy Koran in particular, since it is held by
Muslims to be a stylistic or literary miracle that defies the human mind with its excellence
and beautiful style.

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