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Standardisation of languages – life or death?

Hello and happy summer! (And happy winter to those of you in the Southern Hemisphere!)

In previous posts we’ve thrown around the term ‘standard’, as in Standard English, but we haven’t really gone into what that means. It may seem intuitive to some, but this is actually quite a technical term that is earned through a lengthy process and, as is often the case, it is not awarded easily or to just any variety of a language. Today, I will briefly describe the process of standardising a variety and give you a few thoughts for discussion1. I want to stress that though we will discuss the question, I don’t necessarily think we need to find an answer to whether standardisation is “good” or “bad” – I don’t think either conclusion would be very productive. Still, it’s always good to tug a little bit at the tight boundaries we often put around the thought space reserved for linguistic concepts.

The language bohemian™, at it again.

There are four processes usually involved in the standardisation of a language: selection, elaboration, codification, and acceptance.

Selection

It sure doesn’t start easy. Selection is arguably the most controversial of the processes as this is the step that involves choosing which varieties and forms the standard will be based on. Often in history we find a standard being selected from a prestigious variety, such as the one spoken by the nobility. In modern times this is less comme il faut as nobility don’t have monopoly on literacy and wider communication anymore (thankfully). This can make selection even trickier, though: as the choice of a standard variety becomes more open there is a higher need for sensitivity regarding who is represented by that standard and who isn’t. Selection may still favour an elite group of speakers, even if they may no longer be as clear-cut as a noble class. For example, a standard is often based on the variety spoken in the capital, or the cultural centre, of a nation. The selection of standard forms entails non-selection of others, and these forms are then easily perceived as worse, which affects the speakers of these non-standard forms negatively – this particularly becomes an issue when the standard is selected from a prestigious variety.

In my post about Scots , I briefly mentioned the problem of selection we would face in a standardisation of Scots as a variety which has great variation both within individual speakers and among different speakers (e.g. in terms of lects). Battling this same tricky problem, Standard Basque was mostly constructed from three Basque varieties, mixed with features of others. This standard was initially used mainly by the media and in formal writing with no “real” speakers. However, as more and more previously non-Basque-speaking people in the Basque country started to learn the language, they acquired the standard variety, with the result that this group and their children now speak a variety of Basque which is very similar to the standard.

Elaboration

Standardisation isn’t all a prestigious minefield. A quite fun and creative process of standardisation is elaboration, which involves expanding the language to be appropriate for use in all necessary contexts. This can be done by either adapting or adopting words from other varieties (i.e. other languages or nonstandard lects), by constructing new words using tools (like morphology) from within the variety that’s becoming a standard, or by looking into archaic words from the history of the variety and putting them back into use.

When French was losing its prestige in medieval England, influenced no doubt by the Hundred Years’ War, an effort was initiated to elaborate English. During the Norman Conquest, French had become the language used for formal purposes in England, while English survived as spoken by the common people. This elaboration a few hundred years later involved heavy borrowing of words from French (e.g. ‘government’ and ‘royal’) for use in legal, political, and royal contexts (and from Latin, mainly in medical contexts) – the result was that English could now be used in those situations it previously didn’t have appropriate words for (or where such words had not been in use for centuries)2.

source

Codification

Once selection and elaboration have (mostly) taken place, the process of codification cements the selected standard forms, through, for example, the compilation of dictionaries and grammars. This does not always involve pronunciation, although it can, as it famously does in the British Received Pronunciation (usually just called RP), a modern form of which is still encouraged for use by teachers and other public professions. Codification is the process that ultimately establishes what is correct and what isn’t within the standard – this makes codification the sword of the prescriptivist, meaning that codification is used to argue what the right way to use the language is (y’all know by know what the HLC thinks of prescriptivism).

When forms are codified they are not easily changed, which is why we still see some bizarre spellings in English today.  There are of course not only limitations to codification (as with the spelling example)– there is obvious benefit for communication if we all spell certain things the same way or don’t vary our word choices too much for the same thing or concept. Another benefit, and a big one at that, is that codified varieties are perceived more as real, and this is very important for speakers’ sense of value and identity.


Codification does not a standard make – most of you will know that many varieties have dictionaries without having a standard, Scots being one example. Urban Dictionary is another very good example of codification of non-standard forms.

Acceptance

The final process is surely the lengthiest and perhaps the most difficult to achieve: acceptance. It is crucial that a standard variety receives recognition as such, more especially by officials or other influential speakers but also by the general public. Speakers need to see that there is a use for the standard and that there is a benefit to using it (such as benefiting in social standing or in a career). Generally though, people don’t respond very well to being prescribed language norms, which we have discussed previously, so when standard forms have been selected and codified it does not necessarily lead to people using these forms in their speech (as was initially the case with Standard Basque). Further, if the selection process is done without sensitivity, some groups may feel they have no connection to the standard, sometimes for social or political reasons, and may actively choose to not use it. Again, we find that a sense of identity is significant to us when it comes to language; it is important for us to feel represented by our standard variety.

What’s the use?

Ideally, a standard language could be seen as a way to promote communication within a nation or across several nations. Despite the different varieties of Arabic, for example, Arabic speakers are able to switch to a standard when communicating with each other even if they are from different countries far apart. Likewise, a Scottish person can use Standard English when talking to someone from Australia, while if the same speakers switched back to their local English (or Scots) varieties, they wouldn’t necessarily understand each other. Standardisation certainly eases communication within a country also, and a shared standard variety can provide a sense of shared nationality and culture. There is definitely a point in having a written standard used for our laws, education, politics, and other official purposes which is accessible for everyone. On the other side of this, however, we find a counterforce with speaker communities wanting to preserve their lects and actively opposing using a standard if they can’t identify with it.

So, a thought for discussion I want to leave with you today: Do you think the process of standardisation essentially kills language, or does it it keep it alive? An argument for the first point is that standardisation limits variation3 – this means that when a standard has been established and accepted, the varieties of that standard will naturally start pulling towards the standard as its prestige and use increases. However, standardising is also a way to officially recognise minority varieties, which gives speakers an incentive to keep their language alive. It is also a way to ease understanding between speakers (as explained earlier), and in some cases (like Basque), standardisation gives birth to a new variety acquired as a first language. As I said from the start, maybe we won’t find an answer to this, and maybe we shouldn’t, but it’s worth thinking about these matters in a more critical way.

Footnotes

1 I’ve used the contents of several courses, lectures, and literatures as sources for this post. The four processes of standardisation are credited to Haugen (1996): ‘Dialect, language, nation’.

2 In fact, a large bulk of French borrowings into English comes from this elaboration, rather than from language contact during the Norman Conquest.

3 On a very HLC note, historical standardisation makes research into dialectal variation and language change quite difficult. The standard written form of Old English is based on the West Saxon variety, and there are far fewer documents to be found written in Northumbrian, which was a quite different variety and has played a huge part in the development of the English we know today.

 

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The Scots Leid – The Scots Language

I am very excited to share this post with you, and have been looking forward to it since the dawn of the HLC. Why? This post marks the first part of a mini-series which will tell you the story of the Scots language, its historical and present day status and linguistic elements, while introducing concepts such as language standardisation and the idea of “debased English”. For now, let’s start with a general overview of what Scots is and where it came from. As any essay-boosting student would, I will start with a quote:

“Up until the end of the 18th century largely the entire Scottish population spoke Gaelic […] During the 19th century the English language further dominated the area. It was the language of the church and schools. Essentially all contacts outside of the villages was in English.”

The quote above comes from a language sciences textbook by a Swedish author1 (the translation is my own). I’m gonna leave it with you for now, and by the end of this post it will hopefully become clear why the statements above are not only problematic, but also plainly wrong!

So, what do we mean when we talk about the Scots language? When hearing the name, some assume it’s another name for Scottish Gaelic (usually pronounced Gallic) , others that it’s a name for the variety spoken in Scotland which is “essentially English” with some lexical differences. As I will probably write about Scots again outside of this blog series (I may be a one-trick pony), I figured it was appropriate to outline as simple as possible (it’s not in any way simple) what the Scots language is, isn’t, and what it has been. I am not going to give any absolute answers, because they can be somewhat political, but will try to keep this series nice and diplomatic, and highly linguistic2.

How far back to begin? I think it is best for everyone if I leave pre-Celtic out of this. I can even do without outlining what we know of the Picts, right? I think we should start in the Dark Ages, when the Gaels, also called the Scotti, migrated to Scotland from Ireland. This people and their language, an ancestor variety to Irish and Scottish Gaelic, dominated Scotland for quite some time. In the Middle Ages, there was a shift to a variety referred to as Inglis, deriving from Northumbrian Old English. Inglis was not called so for very long, but soon became Scottis (in the early 16th century) and finally Scots. Scots became the common language of the Scottish lowlands (and northern islands, but slightly later), while Gaelic remained the language of the highlands.

Map of Scotland, 1595. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland3.

The shift from Gaelic to Inglis/Scots began in the Scottish burghs established in Southern Scotland in the 12th century (hint: Edin-burgh). These burghs became  melting pots for various languages, and the main contributors were locally spoken Northumbrian/Anglian (i.e. varieties of Old-Middle English), Northumbrian/Anglian from south of the English border, Anglo-Norman, Gaelic, Scandinavianised English from the previous Danelaw area, and Flemish spoken by merchants from the continent. All of these lovely ingredients came together to form the tasty casserole we call Older Scots. Now, Scots periodisation is not a done deal, and I will tactfully avoid the issue by referring to everything Scots between 1100 and 1700 as Older Scots. I’ll have to refer you to the footnotes4 for more information about this, we need to stay on the ball.

After this rather lengthy intro, we now arrive at the core of what I want to be known by the end of this post: Scots was a historically distinct variety, spoken in the Scottish lowlands, which was used for all functions and purposes for several centuries; it was the language of literature, parliament, legal texts etc., etc. Essentially, Scots and English were two distinct varieties, and recognised as such! It was not until the late 16th century that things started to change. First, strike one, during the Scottish Reformation (1540) the bible was only available in English, making English the language of religion. Then, strike two, King James VI of Scotland became King James I of Scotland and England after the death of Elizabeth I – this event is called the Union of the Crowns (1603) – which made English the language of the royal court.

King James the VI of Scotland and I of England and Scotland.5

The third strike came in 1707, the Union of Parliaments, when Scotland became part of the United Kingdom and thus English became the language of parliament. By this time, Scots lost its status as a language for formal use, and essentially became degraded, in the public view, to a vernacular, “uneducated” dialect used by the working class and rural populations. The final blow came with the Education Act of 1872, which required only English to be spoken and taught in schools6.  

Does this mean that Scots is gone? Of course not, but the status of Scots as a language is a complicated issue. To properly explain what present-day Scots is we would need to dive back into the debate of what constitutes a language. In recent decades, Scots has received a lot of attention and activism; many Scots speakers want to see their variety receiving official language status, they want justification for the marginalisation of their language and some seek standardisation of Scots. What complicates this matter is that spoken Scots is used by different people from different geographical areas and demographic groups, without a unifying standard variety for several centuries, so it has become a highly mixed variety with very different dialects and sociolects under its spectra. If we were to attempt standardisation, would the urban Glasgow speech “win”, or the rural Aberdeenshire Scots? Or, would we construct a standard like what was done with Basque? Further, it has become increasingly difficult to determine where Scots ends and Scottish English (i.e. English with a Scottish accent) begins, especially since most speakers mix their speech with elements from both varieties and change their speech depending on context.

We can now establish that the quote from the Swedish textbook is problematic mainly because (i). Gaelic was not the language of all of Scotland before 1700, and (ii). It’s controversial to claim that Gaelic was overtaken by English, rather than Scots (and that this happened as late as the 19th century). Finally, I recommend all to visit the National Library of Scotland’s Wee Windaes website for more information about Scots literary history in particular, and to get a better idea of what Scots looks and sounds like (the whole website is in Scots). I have tried very hard to not make this too lengthy and too specific, and I hope I did not lose any essential details in the process. While this post was mostly meant as a general overview of the history and terminology surrounding Scots, the next post in the series will be dedicated to the linguistic distinctions between Scots and English.

To be continued.

Footnotes

1I will leave this author anonymous – it is not my place to shame anyone, this person cited someone else and this may not be their area of expertise.

2I want to give a huge shout out and many thanks to the people teaching the Scots courses at the University of Edinburgh who taught me all of this stuff: Dr Rhona Alcorn, Dr Joanna Kopaczyk, Dr Warren Maguire and Dr Benjamin Molineaux. Anything uncited is credited to their lectures, I owe it all to them!

3Accessed at: http://maps.nls.uk/index.html
Copyright terms: http://maps.nls.uk/copyright.html

4A.J. Aitken (i.e. the forefather of modern Scots linguistics, one might say (and this one does say)) is responsible for the traditional periodisation used. However, Joanna Kopazcyk makes very good points regarding why this periodisation is not ideal, and I’ll refer you to her article for those arguments:
Kopaczyk, J. (2013). Rethinking the traditional periodisation of the scots language. In R. M. Millar and J. Cruickshank (Eds.), After the Storm: Papers from the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster. University of Aberdeen.

5Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/use-this-image.php?mkey=mw03416

6This act, of course, also had severe effects for Scottish Gaelic.

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“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”

Hello HLC readers! I’m Lisa, I’m a Swede (this kind, not this kind, and hopefully never this kind) but I live in Scotland, and I’m here to talk to you about the differences between languages and dialects. Now, the title of this post, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy”, should have made everything clear, so that will be my contribution for today.

Joking!

I’m so not done. The title quote was made popular by the sociolinguist, and Yiddish scholar, Max Weinreich (in Yiddish, with Roman letters: a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot)1. This particular quote has been passed down to me on average once per each course I’ve taken in my four years of studying linguistics, which either tells you 1. Linguists are in serious need of new content, or 2. This is probably important for budding linguists to discuss. Both might be true in some cases, but most of the time 2 is the correct answer. We will need to tread carefully, and I don’t intend to make any political statements, but simply to shine some light on the complexity of the matter which, in fact, is often highly political. One final disclaimer: This is a really difficult topic to summarise. Bear with me.

For some of you reading, the question of what is and isn’t a language is probably something you haven’t thought about a lot. Some of you may think that the distinction is clear-cut; a language is distinct, it’s not similar to or dependent on anything else, and a dialect isn’t. You may even say that dialects are clearly sub-languages, because of the very way we phrase “dialects of a language” to imply that dialects belong to a language and not vice versa. Further, dialects are mutually intelligible (i.e. speakers of different dialects of one language can understand each other), which is not the case with languages. This is not exactly wrong, it’s just overly simplified.

First of all, if mutual intelligibility is a dialect criterion then my native Swedish could arguably be a Scandinavian dialect rather than a proper language – I, like most Swedes, understand Norwegian very well, and to some extent Danish, if spoken slowly (I’m currently working on my spoken Danish comprehension by watching both the Bridge and the Killing… My crime vocabulary is looking pretty solid by now). However, a lot of Swedes would not be thrilled to be told that their language is a dialect, and it does feel counter-intuitive to call it one.

On the other hand, there are agreed-upon dialects that are not mutually intelligible. Why are the dialects of, for example, Italian still called dialects, despite speakers of, for example, Emilian and Sicilian not being able to understand each other2 , while Norwegian and Swedish are officially agreed upon to be different languages? Also, what makes people call Catalan a dialect of Spanish (Don’t shoot the messenger!), or Cantonese a dialect of Chinese? Can you see a pattern forming? I’ll spell it out: The term language is most often, but not always, awarded to those “dialects” that have, or have had, official language status in a country, i.e. the dialect of those in power. The term dialect, or lect, is sometimes used neutrally in linguistics to cover both official languages and dialects, but there is  another term which is also used that I like more: variety. Variety is less socio-politically charged, and I use it all the time to avoid having to make a language/dialect distinction when I talk about linguistics.

There are, however, exceptions to the ‘official language’-criterion. If we go back to Spain, for example, no one would argue that Basque is a dialect of Spanish because Basque looks and sounds nothing like Spanish at all (or maybe some would argue this, but could we all agree that this is an unusual opinion?). So, there must be an element of likeness, or similarity, involved. Preferably the variety in question would be a part of the same language family3  – this could be why no one argues the language status of indigenous varieties, like Sami varieties in northern Scandinavia or the various native American varieties like Navajo and Cree.

My take on the issue is this: What people choose to call a language is largely based on four criteria:

  1. Is this variety an official language of a country?
  2. Is the variety distinct in terms of likeness to the official language of that region? Recall what was said above about indigenous languages.
  3. Is this variety considered an example of how that variety should be spoken, i.e. a standard variety, that also has sub-varieties (dialects) that diverge from that standard? An example: British English has a standard, sometimes called BBC English, or RP, but also a plethora of quirky dialects like Geordie, Scouse, Scottish English, Brummie, etc., all still considered to be English.
  4. Does it have an army and a navy?
  5. I jest.
  6. The real number 4: Is the variety standardised? Can we study it with the help of grammars and lexicons? Is it taught in schools? (Language standardisation is a whole topic of its own, which we will come back to in a later post.)

We can see that the term language is strongly connected to the status a variety has in a nation, it is a term that is awarded or given. When we attempt linguistic distinctions between languages and dialects, things get confusing really quickly. Is differing syntax, for example word order differences, more distinguishing than differing vocabulary? Norwegian and Danish have largely similar vocabularies, but very distinct pronunciations, so how does that factor in when we determine whether they are distinct languages or dialects of one variety? How much is the mutual intelligibility due to close contact, rather than actual similarities4 – do I understand Norwegian well because I grew up a couple of hours from the border to Norway, or because Norwegian and Swedish are so similar?

It is also relevant to talk about the historical perspective (after all this is is the Historical Linguist Channel). To throwback to Rebekah’s post last week, we know that English has changed a lot since the Anglo-Saxon times. We all tend to agree that Latin is one language distinct from Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian, but we also know that these languages all originate from Latin. What about English then? Old English and Present Day English look different enough that we could happily call them distinct languages, but what about Early Modern English? When do we say a variety has diverged enough from its parent language to be considered a language in its own right? Is my grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt, a part of my immediate or extended family? Well, that often depends on my relationship to my great-aunt, which brings us back to the subjectivity of the question.

The point I’m trying to make with these confused ramblings is that the term language cannot be defined linguistically, but is a wholly social and political term. The people of Montenegro generally refuse to recognise their variety’s similarity to Serbian, despite the varieties being largely indistinguishable – they speak Montenegrin. Knowing the history of the region though, we might be able to see where the Montenegrians are coming from, why it feels important for them to distinguish themselves as a people through their language5 . When we discuss what a language is, it’s important to keep in mind what the term means for the people who use it. Our language is tightly connected to our sense of identity; this is one reason why we’re so reluctant to see it changing or being used in a way we perceive as wrong (throwback to Sabina’s and Riccardo’s posts). The term dialect is somehow seen as inferior to language, and thus the terminology becomes a much larger issue than any linguistic definitions we can make.

Related to this issue are topics like standardisation (mentioned above), minority languages, and the idea of debased English. The latter two are also upcoming topics. In future posts, I will be addressing a variety that is my special interest, Scots 6, which is particularly affected by the issues discussed here. Scots is a Germanic variety spoken in Scotland, which is closely related to English but is still distinct from English (much like Swedish and Norwegian). First, however, I will be back next week to outline the main disciplines that fall under the umbrella of linguistics.

Footnotes

1He didn’t utter the quote first though, but an auditor in one of his lectures said it to him. I recommend reading about the situation on Wikipedia.

2Ask Riccardo about this issue and your evening entertainment is sorted.

3“Language family” is the name given to a group of languages which share an ancestor. We will dedicate more time to this topic at a later point. Meanwhile, you may admire this beautiful Indo-European and Uralic family tree.

4These and other questions are addressed by linguistic typologists, who try to map the languages of the world, categorise them and determine their relatedness.

5This fact was brought to my attention by a student from Montenegro during the course Scots and Scottish English, taught by Dr. Warren Maguire at the University of Edinburgh. A lot of the discussions we had in that course have provided background for the arguments and questions presented here.

6The Angus Macintosh Centre for Historical Linguistics have made brilliant videos explaining the history of Scots, in both Scots and English. I strongly recommend watching these!