A standard language is the language which is taught in schools, which is taught to non-native speakers, and which forms the basis for the language used in writing. It is the language which is usually spoken by educated people and which is used in formal presentations such as newscasts and video narrations. Grammar books used in schools and dictionaries usually describe the standard language and emphasize the way people should speak and write.
In 1664, the Royal Society set up a committee for improving the English language with the idea of producing a grammar, a dictionary, and guides to spelling reform. Nothing came out of this committee and within a year it seemed to be forgotten. In the 1680s, the idea of an English Academy was championed by Wentworth Dillon, the earl of Roscommon who wanted to refine the language and fix its standard. In 1697, Daniel Defoe proposed that the King establish a society to polish and refine the language. Defoe wanted to purge the language of all irregularities and innovations. With regard to membership in the Academy, Defoe suggested:
“I wou’d therefore have this Society wholly compos’d of Gentlemen; whereof Twelve to be of the Nobility, if possible, and Twelve Private Gentlemen, and a class of Twelve to be left open for meer merit.”
In 1712, Jonathan Swift published “Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue.” Swift saw the English language as imperfect and being corrupted by contemporary authors. Like the earlier proposals, Swift’s ideas failed. English continued to be in a state of anarchy.
For centuries, prescriptive grammarians have been trying to bring order to English grammar so that people can speak and write the language in the “proper” manner. Assuming that Latin represents the pinnacle of grammatical development, and often not understanding that English, unlike French and Spanish, is not a Latin-based language, many grammarians attempted to force Latin grammar rules on the language. At other times, it seems as though they simply invented rules. These rules include things like you shouldn’t split infinitives (I suspect that most native English speakers have no idea what a split infinitive is, or, for that matter, what a “whole” infinitive is), and sentences mustn’t end with prepositions.)
With regard to grammar books which describe how people should speak and write English, David Crystal, in his book The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left, writes:
“Manuals of English usage have sold well for generations, and they all make the same claims. The curious thing is that the same issues that bug people now were bugging them 250 years ago. Life and language have moved on, but still people worry. Millions feel linguistically inferior.”
David Crystal also writes:
“Unlike the situation in Latin, there was no one dialect recognized as the one to be used by educated English-users everywhere. There was no ‘standard’ English.”
Linguist John McWhorter, in his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, puts it this way:
“Modern English grammar is, in a word, weird.”
McWhorter also says:
“English is not normal. It is a mixed language not only in its words, but in its grammar.”
Standard languages are the idealized forms of the language and differ from the non-standard form which is usually uncodified and unwritten. Non-standard language is often used in daily conversation, even among “educated” people.
Non-standard language, from a linguistic viewpoint, is just as good as standard language and serves the needs of those who speak it. While it is common for some people to view non-standard language as somehow inferior, this apparent inferiority comes from the association of the speakers with under-privileged, low-status groups. Attitudes toward non-standard dialects generally reflect the social structure of society. David Crystal writes:
“Upper-class people ridicule the way uneducated people speak. Ordinary people ridicule the way educated people speak—though usually at a safe distance.”
The standard for upper-class English speech is, of course, the King’s English (or the Queen’s English at present) which is based on the speech of the British monarch. Queen Elizabeth II has been the reigning British monarch for many decades and during her reign she has given a Christmas message to the people via radio. In his book Sociolinguistics: A Very Short Introduction, John Edwards reports:
“Thanks in part of the archived recordings of Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas messages, for example, sociolinguists can demonstrate that she has changed her pronunciation throughout her sixty years on the throne.”
The Queen’s English has become less upper-class and more middle-class.
One example of a non-standard language is African American Vernacular English which is used by a majority of African Americans when conversing in informal settings. It developed in the context of social and residential segregation and differs from Standard English in terms of phonology, syntax, and morphology. African American Vernacular English, also called Black English, is not a reflection of any inability to master standard English, but is a result of a unique linguistic history.
In his book Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a Pure Standard English, John McWhorter briefly describes the history of Black English:
“Black English arose among slaves in the plantation South and as such was mainly the product of three sources. First was the speech of the white plantation owners. As one might imagine, wresting a plantation out of untamed land in a hot place was not the first lifestyle of choice for a seventeenth-century Englishman. Accordingly, founding plantation owners tended not to be members of the ruling elite, and therefore often spoke nonstandard dialects of English and passed it on to their descendants. Many of these people traced to Irish or Scotch-Irish ancestry.”
In his book Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, Seth Lerer writes:
“There is no single strain of African American English. Though a good deal of recent scholarship has set out to define the distinctive phonology, morphology, and lexis of the African American community, such features are not fully shared by every speaker of African ancestry. Some are urban, some are rural; some Southern, some not. Indeed, some of the central tensions in the history of African American English lie precisely on these axes of location and migration.”
In the twenty-first century, English continues to change and there are still those who feel that English dialects such as Black English or American Indian Reservation English are not only sub-standard but are actually an indication of mental and social inferiority. From the viewpoints of linguistics, however, these dialects are just as capable of communicating the full range of human emotions and thoughts as any language.