Standard English: Discordant Voices

Abstract

Standard English, belonging as it does to the optimistic rationality of the Enlightenment, has reached the nadir of all grand meta‐narratives, of being quotation marked. This fate may rile liberal humanists such as Randolph Quirk (1985: 6: ‘I hold that the stated or implied orthodoxy of regarding the term “standard” as fit only for quotation marks is a trahison des clercs’). But of course liberal humanists do not (yet?) accept that it is time to surrender to post modernism. If they do, then the relativizing of Standard English (as of other languages) seems inevitable: Lyotard (1984) reminds us that the post‐modern age is characterised by a loss of faith in all grand meta‐narratives, while Hobsbawm (1994) epigrammatizes that all postmodernisms ‘tended to a radical relativism’. This relativizing push has four major sources: 1. the general attack on all Enlightenment certainties; 2. the political (Marxist and feminist) critique against hegemony (‘what passes for standard so‐called correct English is not what is spoken by millions of people, Black or white, but what a small group of often unprincipled people speak’ (Smitherman, cited in Kramarae and Treichler, 1985: 431); 3. the argument from diffusion – with the global spread of English, how many standard Englishes are there? One consequence has been the claim that English language tests are unfair because they use Standard English or an inappropriate Standard English; 4. linguists' claim that all languages are equal, the very trahison des clercs that Quirk refers to. Honey's (1997) defence of Standard English against its enemies turns the apophthegm ‘language is power’ on its head by arguing that Standard English does not disempower the weak, as its critics maintain, but rather empowers them. The status of the native speaker is examined in relation to the standardisation claims of the New Englishes and International English and it is then argued that in the institutional settings in which applied linguistics operates, the imperative to make decisions with regard to language policy, curriculum planning, text‐book and examination models etc. means that the lack of clarity about Standard English does not diminish its authority.

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