Non-Standard Lankan English Writing: New Models and Old Modalities

Abstract

Non-standard forms of writing in print are less prolific and less easily accessible than spoken varieties. In addition, when non-standard structures do appear in writing, wittingly or not, they often represent speech situations, creating a sense that these are merely imitations of non-standard conversation captured on the page. This fact, which has perhaps more to do with the politics of publication and the gatekeeping role played by editors and academics than with self-conscious choices made by individual writers, has led many scholars to make too sharp a distinction between these two functions.¹¹⁸ Non-standard writing, when recognized,¹¹⁹ is all too easily reduced to ‘ignorance’ and ‘error’ that must be corrected/avoided. Thus, much of the evidence for non-standard writing that is non-idiosyncratic remains outside the archive. When examples are found in print, they are invariably unselfconscious in that the writers are not aware that the rules of grammar and good taste have been broken. In this sense, therefore, in most cases, these examples are, in fact, ‘errors’ that are made from ‘ignorance’. Hence, the impossibility of quickly dismissing the derogations of conventional linguistics which relegates these to the realm of the ‘unacceptable’. To treat these ‘errors’ seriously, then, what is required is a overhauling of the very theoretical framework within which ‘acceptability’ and standardization itself takes place.¹²⁰