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Three Views of Standard English

This page gives access to three papers or talks on the subject of Standard English.

Peter Trudgill: Standard English: what it isn’t

• published in Tony Bex & Richard J. Watts eds. Standard English: the widening debate. London: Routledge, 1999, 117-128.
• Standard English is a dialect which is socially superior to other dialects but structurally inferior.

Richard Hogg: The standardiz/sation of English

• A paper presented to the Queen's English Society in March 2000.
• Standard English, as such, dates from the mid fifteenth century and has been constantly changing ever since in spite of the attentions of prescriptivists.

Richard Hudson: The language teacher and descriptive versus prescriptive norms: The educational context.

• A paper presented (in absentia) to a workshop in Paris on prescriptivism and foreign-language teaching in March 2000.
• Standard English, unlike other standard languages, is now highly codified for non-native speakers, but not at all codified for native speakers. However codification for natives would be quite helpful for schools.

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