The Standard Language: the Literary Language

Abstract

The term ‘standard’ has a complex recorded history in that it demonstrates at least two major senses amongst the variety of its uses. First, there is the sense of ‘standard’ as a military or naval ensign, defined in the OED as ‘a flag, sculptured figure or other conspicuous object, raised on a pole to indicate the rallying point of an army (or fleet) … the distinctive ensign of a king, great noble, or commander, or of a nation or city’. The function of this ‘standard’ was to act as an authoritative focal point, as a marker and constructor of authority around which could be grouped armies, fleets, nations and cities. Thus the ‘standard’ would be a focus of unity and under it would be all those who recognised its authority. In this sense the ‘standard’ is intertwined with crucial concepts of commonality, unity and therefore, at least in part, uniformity.

The victory of one reigning language (dialect) over the others, the supplanting of languages, their enslavement, the process of illuminating them with the True Word, the incorporation of barbarians and lower social strata into a unitary language of culture and truth, the canonisation of ideological systems, philology with its methods of studying and teaching dead languages, languages that were by that very fact ‘unities’, IndoEuropean linguistics with its focus of attention, directed away from language plurality to a single proto-language — all this determined the content and power of the category of ‘unitary language’ in linguistic and stylistic thought.

(M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p.271)