The Standard Language: the Language of the Literate

Abstract

The term ‘standard language’ achieved at least one clear use in the mid-nineteenth century in that it indicated the uniform and commonly accepted national literary language upon which linguistic historians and lexicographers worked. Such a sense had in fact been indicated in the work of the eighteenth-century grammarian Priestley a century earlier when he had argued that ‘the English and the Scotch, had the Kingdoms continued separate, might have been distinct languages, having two different standards of writing’ (Priestley, 1762, p.139). However, the cultural and political conjunction of the two kingdoms that culminated in the 1707 Act of Union meant that there had emerged a single standard of writing throughout the whole national territory which was to be traced later by the nineteenth-century linguistic historians.

It has largely influenced the local dialects, for the children hear a form of it from the teachers in their schools, servants hear it from their masters, tradesmen from their customers — everyone hears it in the parish church.

(H. Wyld, The Growth Of English, 1907, p.48)