Standard English
In an English-speaking country, Standard English is the variety of English that has undergone codification to the point of being socially perceived as the standard language, associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record.
All linguistic features are subject to the effects of standardisation, including morphology, phonology, syntax, lexicon, register, discourse markers, pragmatics, as well as written features such as spelling conventions, punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation practices. SE is local to nowhere: its grammatical and lexical components are no longer regionally marked, although many of them originated in different, non-adjacent dialects, and it has very little of the variation found in spoken or earlier written varieties of English. According to Peter Trudgill, Standard English is a social dialect pre-eminently used in writing that is distinguishable from other English dialects largely by a small group of grammatical "idiosyncrasies", such as irregular reflexive pronouns and an "unusual" present-tense verb morphology.
The term "Standard" refers to the regularisation of the grammar, spelling, usages of the language and not to minimal desirability or interchangeability. For example, there are substantial differences among the language varieties that countries of the Anglosphere identify as "standard English": in England and Wales, the term Standard English identifies British English, the Received Pronunciation accent, and the grammar and vocabulary of United Kingdom Standard English ; in Scotland, the variety is Scottish English; in the United States, the General American variety is the spoken standard; and in Australia, the standard English is General Australian. By virtue of a phenomenon sociolinguists call "elaboration of function", specific linguistic features attributed to a standardised dialect become associated with nonlinguistic social markers of prestige. The standardised dialect itself, in other words, is not linguistically superior to other dialects of English used by an Anglophone society.
Unlike with some other standard languages, there is no national academy or international academy with ultimate authority to codify Standard English; its codification is thus only by widespread prescriptive consensus. The codification is therefore not exhaustive or unanimous, but it is extensive and well-documented.
Definitions
English is a pluricentric language because it has multiple standard varieties in different countries. Although standard English is usually associated with official communications and settings, it is diverse in registers, such as those for journalism and for academic publishing. This diversity in registers also exists between the spoken and the written forms of SE, which are characterised by degrees of formality; therefore, Standard English is distinct from formal English, because it features stylistic variations, ranging from casual to formal. Furthermore, the usage codes of nonstandard dialects are less stabilised than the codifications of Standard English, and thus more readily accept and integrate new vocabulary and grammatical forms. Functionally, the national varieties of SE are characterised by generally accepted rules, often grammars established by linguistic prescription in the 18th century.English originated in England during the Anglo-Saxon period, and is now spoken as a first or second language in many countries of the world, many of which have developed one or more "national standards". English is the first language of the majority of the population in a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas and Barbados and is an official language in many others, including India, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa and Nigeria; each country has a standard English with a grammar, spelling and pronunciation particular to the local culture.
As the result of colonisation and historical migrations of English-speaking populations, and the predominant use of English as the international language of trade and commerce, English has also become the most widely used second language. Countries in which English is neither indigenous nor widely spoken as an additional language may import a variety of English via instructional materials and consider it "standard" for teaching and assessment purposes. Typically, British English is taught as standard across Europe, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, and American English is taught as standard across Latin America and East Asia. This does, however, vary between regions and individual teachers. In some areas a pidgin or creole language blends English with one or more native languages.
Grammar
Although the standard Englishes of the anglophone countries are similar, there are minor grammatical differences and divergences of vocabulary among the varieties. In American and Australian English, for example, "sunk" and "shrunk" as past-tense forms of "sink" and "shrink" are acceptable as standard forms, whereas standard British English retains only the past-tense forms of "sank" and "shrank". In Afrikaner South African English, the deletion of verbal complements is becoming common. This phenomenon sees the objects of transitive verbs being omitted: "Did you get?", "You can put in the box". This kind of construction is infrequent in most other standardised varieties of English.Origins
In the past, different scholars have meant different things by the phrase 'Standard English', when describing its emergence in medieval and early modern England. In the nineteenth century, it tended to be used in relation to the wordstock. Nineteenth-century scholars Earle and Kington-Oliphant conceived of the standardisation of English in terms of ratios of Romance to Germanic vocabulary. Earle claimed that the works of the poets Gower and Chaucer, for instance, were written in what he called 'standard language' because of their amounts of French-derived vocabulary.Subsequently, attention shifted to the regional distribution of phonemes. Morsbach, Heuser, and Ekwall conceived of standardisation largely as relating to sound-change, especially as indicated by spellings for vowels in stressed syllables, with a lesser emphasis on morphology.
Mid-twentieth-century scholars McIntosh and Samuels continued to focus on the distribution of spelling practice but as primary artefacts, which are not necessarily evidence of underlying articulatory reality. Their work led to the publication of the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, which aims to describe dialectal variation in Middle English between 1350 and 1450. The final date was chosen to reflect the increasing standardisation of written English. Although as they note, "The dialects of the spoken language did not die out, but those of the written language did".
A number of late-twentieth-century scholars tracked morphemes as they standardised, such as auxiliary do, third-person present-tense -s, you/thou, the wh- pronouns, and single negation, multiple negations being common in Old and Middle English and remaining so in spoken regional varieties of English.
Present-day investigations
In the twenty-first century, scholars consider all of the above and more, including the rate of standardisation across different text-types such as administrative documents; the role of the individual in spreading standardisation; the influence of multilingual and mixed-language writing; the influence of the Book of Common Prayer; standardisation of the wordstock; evolution of technical registers; standardisation of glyphs and morphemes; and the partial standardisation of Older Scots.Late West Saxon
After the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great and his successors, the West Saxon variety of Old English began to influence writing practices in other parts of England. The first variety of English to be called a "standard literary language" was the West Saxon variety of Old English.However, Lucia Kornexl defines the classification of Late West Saxon Standard as rather constituting a set of orthographic norms than a standardised dialect, as there was no such thing as standardisation of Old English in the modern sense: Old English did not standardise in terms of reduction of variation, reduction of regional variation, selection of word-stock, standardisation of morphology or syntax, or use of one dialect for all written purposes everywhere.
The Norman Conquest of 1066 decreased the usage of Old English, but it was still used in parts of the country for at least another century.
Mixed language
Following the changes brought about by the Norman Conquest of 1066, England became a trilingual society. Literate people wrote in Medieval Latin and Anglo-Norman French more than they wrote in monolingual English. In addition, a widely used system developed which mixed several languages together, typically with Medieval Latin as the grammatical basis, adding in nouns, noun-modifiers, compound-nouns, verb-stems and -ing forms from Anglo-Norman French and Middle English. This mixing of the three in a grammatically regular system is known to modern scholars as mixed-language, and it became the later fourteenth and fifteenth-century norm for accounts, inventories, testaments and personal journals.The mixed-language system was abandoned over the fifteenth century, and at different times in different places, it became replaced by monolingual supralocal English, although it was not always a straightforward exchange. For example, Alcolado-Carnicero surveyed the London Mercers' Livery Company Wardens' Accounts and found that they switched back and forth for over seventy years between 1390 and 1464 before finally committing to monolingual English.
Individual scribes spent whole careers in the mixed-language stage, with no knowledge that monolingual English would be the eventual outcome and that it was in fact a stage of transition. For much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, writing in mixed-language was the professional norm in money-related text types, providing a conduit for the borrowing of Anglo-Norman vocabulary into English.