Hello everybody!
Today I am going to tell you a bit more about the process of standardization. It takes a long time for a language to become the standard.
There are four stages in this process, namely: selection, acceptance, elaboration and codification. These stages have different names, but we will stick to these.
1. Selection
In a language there are a lot of varieties, namely regional varieties, social varieties and so on. Therefore it seems normal that in orde to develop a standard language, one should pick one of these varieties as the standard language.
2. Acceptance
In this phase, the chosen variety has to be accepted by the community, which is done through institutions, agencies and authorities. Some of these authorities are media, schools, politics etc. It is basically the phase that makes sure the chosen variety becomes the standard for the community and that the rest are dialects of that standard.
3. Elaboration
It is possible that the chosen variety does not have every fuction needed, if that is the case, the language needs to be further elaborated.
4. Codification
In the last phase all of the grammar rules need to be written down in a grammar book, a dictionary needs to be made, so that the language has reference books.
Sources:
