Standard Language Essay

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The standard language is often viewed and defined through stages in its development. Such stages can, first of all, be described by juxtaposing them to historical developments of societies, as part of a broader history of the society or the language (e.g. Migliorini, 1984 and Chaurand, 1999:11). Another approach of development stages is looking at the standardisation of the language itself (Ferguson, 1968; Haugen, 1966; 1972:252; Leith 1983; Joseph, 1987; Milroy & Milroy, 1987; and Thomas, 1991; Van der Wal and Van Bree, 2008). A more contemporary and synchronic approach to defining standard languages is looking at the general qualities that the language has developed, often including the prototypical speakers to go with these qualities (e.g. Jespersen, 1925; Stewart, 1968:533-539; Finegan, 2007:14; Van der Wal and Van Bree, 1992:369).
Fisher studied the birth and development of standard varieties of French, English, Spanish, and Italian and mentioned the lack of a discussion that points out similarities in this process in various countries and emphasised that such similarities are necessary for a general understanding of the nature of standard languages (1996: 65). It should be obvious that generalising outside this European context is even more problematic. Both the diachronic and synchronic approach to defining the standard language that have appeared suffer from the weakness that they take well-known, mostly western, languages as their point of departure and many of the approach taken so far can safely be qualified Euro-centric. The authors, too, are often from a western society, which leads to approaches of replicating older models and the underlying assumptions regarding the coming to existence of nation states in a European...

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.... This situation and other similar ones suggest that unlike in the Anglo-western countries where everyone is somehow able to speak the standard language or has access to it, somehow, if they want to', non-western countries do not have such a luxury. The standard language could be inaccessible, and therefore intrinsically not standard in non-western multilingual countries.
It is often assumed that the standard language is definitely prestigious and that the other varieties are of a lower status, however, in some situations such as North Africa, the classification of languages according to status is difficult given that the overt status lies not with the formal status (Bassiouney 2014). Bassiouney further explains that Standard Arabic is not necessarily the prestigious variety in Egypt, but instead, the prestigious variety is a specific variety of Cairene Arabic.

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