In this article, I claim that, while placing his theory of language, language planning, and standardization within a conceptual and historical framework inspired by Modernity, the emergence of the nation-state and liberal democracy, Haugen carefully mapped sociolinguistic phenomena onto their political treatment. And it was this careful and honest…

The present paper looks in detail at the process of codification, i.e. how a single variety is altered in such a way as to become the publicly accepted, stigma-free variety of a country or major region. There is both implicit and explicit codification. For Haugen it would seem that he was referring to the latter process in which there is formal…

Haugen's model (in "Sociolinguistics," Penguin, Harmondsworth, pp 97-111, 1972 [1966]) of standardisation has been widely adopted in general histories of particular languages, not least because of its clarity and simplicity. In this article, I focus on its treatment of codification, with a view to suggesting refinements to this part of…

Over 50 years ago, the Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen published a seminal paper entitled 'Dialect, language and nation' (Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966b), in which he expounds his four-step model of standardization, explaining the development from dialect to standard following a process of norm selection, codification, acceptance and…

This contribution explores the concept of selection as an integral part of Haugen's standardisation model from a theoretical as well as an empirical angle. It focuses on different types of factors of selection and how they are relevant to the study of selection processes both on the level of individual variants and whole varieties. The question of…

Since their introduction by the Conservative government in 2013, primary school children in England have taken a mandated grammar, punctuation and spelling assessment, which places an emphasis on decontextualised, standardised English and the identification of traditional grammatical terminology. Despite some concise criticisms from educational…

This paper addresses the role of bottom-up prescriptive pressures in language policy debates and their interplay with institution-driven, top-down influences. I approach this issue through an analysis of social media data concerning debates surrounding recent orthographic reform in France. Building on Heyd's (Lang Soc 43: 489-514, 2014) discussion…

The paper discusses "implementation" and "acceptance" as crucial elements of a historical-sociolinguistic reappraisal of Haugen's well-known theory of standardization. The case study that we focus on is the Dutch language in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. In this period, Dutch…

What almost all accounts of standardisation histories have in common is a focus on printed, formal or literary texts from writing elites. While Haugen identified the written form of a language as "a significant and probably crucial requirement for a standard language" (Haugen in Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966a; Haugen, in: Bright (ed)…

Since its publication in 2001, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has become a highly influential means of describing language proficiency. Its spread has, however, been marked by contradictions, since the framework has been appropriated in the service of a variety of different policy agendas. In this paper, I argue…

This article examines language policy in the virtual linguistic landscape (VLL) in Norway and its development over time. The analysis is based on diachronic website data and interviews with state employees concerning the presence or absence of different languages on the websites of three central state institutions. The article reveals a linguistic…

In the globalized economy, old metadiscursive regimes have been challenged by new conditions which are often considered to be more favourable to heteroglossic practices. In Flemish Belgium, the liberalization of the TV market is said to have transformed the broadcaster VRT from a public service aiming at educating viewers into a competitive…

This article offers a historiographic analysis of twentieth century debates amongst agents with linguistic, missionary and ideological interest in the standardisation or harmonisation of two widely used clusters of languages in South Africa, Nguni and Sotho. The discussion illustrates how faith-based and political ideologies interact with and…

Developing a standard for a minority language is not a neutral process; this has consequences for the status of the language and how the language users relate to the new standard. A potential inherent problem with standardisation is whether the language users themselves will accept and identify with the standard. When standardising minority…

This paper uses Language Management Theory (Nekvapil and Sherman, "Language management in contact situations. Perspectives from three continents". Peter Lang, Frankfurt/Main, 2009) to investigate Facebook pages as a site and instrument of behavior-toward-language, focusing specifically on the use of humor. The language in question is…