Hello everybody!
Today I'm going to talk about 'Standard English'.
Every country, where English is the official language, has another standard of English, these varieties are similar in the core. There are differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and sometimes in grammar, but it is nothing too significant.
This basically means that there is not one standard of English, but that there are multiple. When studying English, mostly RP and North American English are used as the norm.
Nevertheless, there are quite some differences between North American English and RP. The differences are not that big, but they can sometimes be confusing as to what is the American variant and what is the British one. You cannot use both of the variants at the same time. This is shown in the images below: the image on the left gives examples of different vocabulary and the one on the right of different spelling. Normally, native speakers know both possibilities and can therefore understand each other perfectly.
Next to the these varieties, there are also smaller varieties that depend on where you live and what your background is. It is a good thing to have multiple dialects in your backpack, so that you can use different ones according to the situation you are in.
When someone is talking about 'Standard English', they often mean 'Standard Written English', because it is easier to standardise the written language than the spoken language. A language changes all the time when we speak, and it is much easier to introduce new words or grammar rules to it. That is why slang changes from generation to generation.
I've been explaining some things about standard languages, but how do they actually come to be standard ones? Some languages start out as pidgin or creole languages. They were first investigated by linguistics in the 1960s. According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, "a pidgin language is a language that is formed from a mixture of several languages when speakers of different languages need to talk to each other." It has no native speakers, but it is a contact language and it is mostly used in the oral form. Creole, on the other hand, is a normal language in almost every way. A lot of the times, a creole is developed from a pidgin language, but not always. It is possible that creoles just spring up out of nowhere. It is the first language of a new generation of speakers. They have written expressions and they evolve, next to that they also have their own literature and often have a translation of the 'Bible'.
There are different points of view when talking about pidgins and creoles. There are two different sides, namely prescriptivists and descriptivists. Prescritivists say that the standard is the rule, descriptivists, on the other hand, say that each variety is acceptable. The former talks about errors and the latter about features, what is the difference between the two?
When you follow prescriptivism, it means that everything that is different from the standard, is an error. There is only one correct language. Descriptivists talk about features, which means that each variety has its own features. So, it does not mean that the variety is wrong or less good than the standard, it just means that it is different. Nowadays, grammars tend to describe the language instead of prescribing it.
In conclusion, there is no such thing as 'Standard English'. Each country has its own standard, and students of English can just choose the standard they want to follow. It is, however, true that some varieties have more prestige than others, but that is for another post.
Thanks for reading and see you soon!
x Evelien x
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