Importance Of Codification In English

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Codification of English
Standardization refers to the process by which a language has been codified in some way (Wardhaugh and Fuller, n.d. 2010: p31). It involves four stages; selection of norms, codification of form, elaboration of function, and implementation by the speech community. Standardization is concerned with codification as a linguistic form. According to Einar Haugen; codification leads to 'minimal variation in form' (Stein & Tieken-Boon van Ostade, n.d. 1994: p160), therefore it reinforces a certain variety which has been selected and accepted.
Codification is an ongoing process, even though it is the second stage in the standardization. The linguistic term codification refers to the process of standardizing and developing a …show more content…

Johnson's Dictionary was significant because it sat the standard for lexicon in both Britain and the United States, besides it was the major work of codification, and the first acknowledge variation in meaning and usage. As there was no recognized academy in Britain, Dr. Johnson had done his huge work in two large volumes over eight years. His dictionary which wrote with personal efforts contains more than 40000 words, and about 114000 supporting quotations. He used several techniques which helped him to write his dictionary perfectly, such as incorporating usage note and making decisions on correctness (Seargeant and Swann, 2012). Later, Noah Webster who became the father of American English (Uni-due.de, 2017), wrote his dictionary (1828) based on American dialects to distinguish between American English and the British one.
The process of codification has some important influences; the kings English to provide for administrative and legal language. Literary English was incorporated to be used by great literature and for printing and publishing. Oxford English was incorporated too to be used for education and religious purposes. (ThoughtCo, …show more content…

Most dictionaries depended on personal invitations, and were codified a list of words that most writers thought that these words would be useful. For example; Shakespeare, the great writer and poet, invented over 1700 words like swagger and torture. However, modern dictionaries don’t allow personal invitations, their criteria depend on words used by various writers, not just one writer 'as in Shakespeare period', so these words become candidates to include them into dictionaries. Oxford University Press developed criteria for including words in the dictionary, they called it corpus which is a database contains 'a collection of texts of written or spoken language presented in electronic form' (Anon, 2017). Corpus help lexicographers to decide if new words will include in the dictionary or not. Corpus contains 2.5 million words of the 21st century, and editors update corpus every three months. This process mainly based on three stages: reading, recording, and

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