Prescription and Tradition in Language

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is Professor and Chair of English Sociohistorical Linguistics at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on sociohistorical linguistics, standardisation and prescriptivism, Late Modern English, 18th and 19th-century letter writing, and Jane Austen’s language.Carol Percy is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her main research interests are Late Modern English, standardisation and prescriptivism, history of education, women’s studies, and children’s literature.

• AcknowledgementsContributorsIntroduction1. Carol Percy and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade: Prescription and Tradition: Establishing Standards across Time and SpacePart 1: General and Theoretical2. Dick Smakman and Sandra Nekesa Barasa: Defining “Standard”: Towards a Crosscultural Definition of the Language Norm3. Florian Coulmas: Prescriptivism and Writing Systems4. Henning Klöter: “What is Correct Chinese?” Revisited5. Felix K. Ameka: The Uselessness of the Useful: Language Standardisation and Variation in Multilingual Contexts6. Katja Lochtman: Prescriptivism and Sociolinguistic Competence in German as a Foreign LanguagePart 2: Prescription and Tradition7. Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade: Prescriptivism in a Comparative Perspective: The Case of France and England8. Rita Queiroz de Barros: “A Higher Standard of Correctness than is Quite Desirable”: Linguistic Prescriptivism in Charles Dickens’ Journals9. Gijsbert Rutten and Rik Vosters: Competing Language Norms in the Southern Low Countries (1815-1830)10. Heimir van der Feest Viðarsson: The Syntax of Others: “Un-Icelandic” Verb Placement in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Icelandic11. Dominik Banhold: School Grammars and Language Guides: Prescriptivism in the German Language Codex in the Early Twentieth CenturyPart 3: Usage Guides: An English Tradition12. Robin Straaijer: A Perspective on Prescriptivism: Language in Reviews of The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage13. Mark Kaunisto: Which Entries Need to be Standardised? Variation in the Choice of Entries in Usage Guides14. Matthijs Smits: “Garnering” Respect? The Emergence of Authority in the American Usage Tradition15. Don Chapman: Stalwarts, SNOOTs and Some Readers: How “Traditional Rules” are TraditionalPart 4: Re-defining Boundaries: Current Issues and Challenges16. Martin Gill: “Goodbye, Sweet England”: Language, Nation and Normativity in Popular British News Media17. Danielle Candel: Prescription and Tradition: From the French Dictionnaire de l’Académie to the Official French Language Enrichment Process (1996-2014)18. Arto Mustajoki: Challenges in the Standardisation of Contemporary Russian19. Loreta Vaicekauskienė: Language Regimentation as Soviet Inheritance: Joining Scholarship and State Ideology20. Aleksandra Gjurkova: Prescription and Language Management in Macedonia21. Pieter Duijff: The Standardisation Process of Frisian: A Word List as a Result22. Miren Lourdes Oñederra: The Standardisation of Pronunciation: Basque Today, between Maintenance and Variation23. Pam Peters: Epilogue: On Establishing the Standard Language – and Language StandardsIndex

Long ignored by professional linguists, or dismissed as ‘unnatural’ or ‘artificial’, prescriptivism in language is in this volume the object of serious scientific investigation. This collection explores the vast range of sociolinguistic contexts for prescriptivism, and firmly demonstrates the important place for this research in general linguistics.