English Language Standardization

Standardization of the English Language

English was not the original indigenous language of Britain. The first arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, the inhabitants of the country spoke Celtic languages. Yet English shows few dialects brought by the Germanic invaders. Nor was the subsequent growth of English within Britain a smooth or inevitable trajectory. After the Norman invasion, English was not the first language of the ruling classes. For several countries, French and Latin were spoken in England as well as English which in its many regional forms was the language of everyday life and of the lower classes. In the fourteenth century, the official government documents were first written in English, a sense of a national

Nor should the history of English be seen in many sense as finished; as well as its spread through the British Isles and beyond, English continues to shift and develop within England itself. This paper discuss the standardization, which is mean the social and political process by which norms of language usage are agreed and enforced. And It's important to know that the standardization passed through four stages; selection, codification, elaboration and implementation.

Firstly, selection involves the selection from particular variety of a certain languages to be used as a standard language through the country. For many

In the sixteenth century, there is evidence of a consensus of opinions as the "Best English" at least for writing. At that time, London-based standard had been selected and accepted by people through the country. The most frequently quoted text from this period from George Puttenham. Puttenham's text was one of the most important guides for hopeful writers produced at this time, which testify to the beginning of elaboration of function as the standard variety begins to take over functions previously carried out in Latin. At this time there was a feeling that English was not a appropriate for writing; because it lacked eloquence and classical rhetoric. For that, the complaints and apologies were proliferated, all of which tell the same story: the author is ashamed of writing in such a crude medium, but feels compelled in order to reach his readers who don’t know Latin, which was all the authors write in Latin because it was considered as a rhetoric language. English was considered barbarous, base and mean because of its lake of vocabulary. But the last decade of the sixteenth century there was a huge influx of new words into English, most of which were from Latin origin, which is filled the gap in the language. In the course of the renaissance and reformation gave impetus to