3. Prescriptivism and Writing Systems

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgements ix
4. Contributors xi
5. 1. Prescription and Tradition: Establishing Standards across Time and Space 1
6. Part 1: General and Theoretical
7. 2. Defining ‘Standard’: Towards a Cross-Cultural Definition of the Language Norm 23
8. 3. Prescriptivism and Writing Systems 39
9. 4. ‘What is Correct Chinese?’ Revisited 57
10. 5. The Uselessness of the Useful: Language Standardisation and Variation in Multilingual Contexts 71
11. 6. Prescriptivism and Sociolinguistic Competence in German as a Foreign Language 88
12. Part 2: Prescription and Tradition
13. 7. Prescriptivism in a Comparative Perspective: The Case of France and England 105
14. 8. ‘A Higher Standard of Correctness than is Quite Desirable’: Linguistic Prescriptivism in Charles Dickens’s Journals 121
15. 9. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Competing Language Norms in the Southern Low Countries (1815–1830) 137
16. 10. The Syntax of Others: ‘Un-Icelandic’ Verb Placement in 19thand Early 20th-Century Icelandic 152
17. 11. School Grammars and Language Guides: Prescriptivism in the German Language Codex in the Early 20th Century 168
18. Part 3: Usage Guides: An English Tradition
19. 12. A Perspective on Prescriptivism: Language in Reviews of The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage 185
20. 13. Which Items Need to be Standardised? Variation in the Choice of Entries in Usage Guides 202
21. 14. ‘Garnering’ Respect? The Emergence of Authority in the American Usage Tradition 221
22. 15. Stalwarts, SNOOTS and Some Readers: How ‘Traditional Rules’ are Traditional 238
23. Part 4: Redefining Boundaries: Current Issues and Challenges
24. 16. ‘Goodbye, Sweet England’: Language, Nation and Normativity in Popular British News Media 255
25. 17. Prescription and Tradition: From the French Dictionnaire de l’Académie to the Official French Language Enrichment Process (1996–2014) 273
26. 18. Challenges in the Standardisation of Contemporary Russian 288
27. 19. Language Regimentation as Soviet Inheritance: Joining Scholarship and State Ideology 303
28. 20. Prescription and Language Management in Macedonia 318
29. 21. The Standardisation Process of Frisian: A Word List as a Result 331
30. 22. The Standardisation of Pronunciation: Basque Today, between Maintenance and Variation 342
31. Epilogue: On Establishing the Standard Language – and Language Standards 355
32. Index 367