Authority in Language: Investigating Standard EnglishRoutledge, 2012 M03 12 - 208 pages Authority in Language explores the perennially topical and controversial notion of correct and incorrect language. James and Lesley Milroy cover the long-running debate over the teaching of Standard English in Britain and compare the language ideologies in Britain and the USA, involving a discussion of the English-Only movement and the Ebonics controversy. They consider the historical process of standardisation and its social consequences, in particular discrimination against low-status and ethnic minority groups on the basis of their language traits. This Routledge Linguistics Classic is here reissued with a new foreword and a new afterword in which the authors broaden their earlier concept of language ideology. Authority in Language is indispensable reading for educationalists, teachers and linguists and a long-standing text for courses in sociolinguistics, modern English grammar, history of English and language ideology. |
From inside the book
... scholars , however , have always had good reason to assert that their discipline is fundamentally descriptive and not prescriptive . During this century , their assertions have been motivated by a desire to study language in all its ...
... scholars, linguistics had become primarily a historical or evolutionary discipline. It was clearly necessary for them to give attention to obscure and antique varieties of a 'non- standard' kind if they were to explain the complicated ...
... scholar is to do his work adequately (to give a clear description of a language, to explain how children acquire ... scholarly neglect (until recently) of the social functions of language. Although it is understandable that linguists ...
... scholars (including – astonishingly – Noam Chomsky, who has never been concerned with educational or social issues), as encouraging a neglect of standard English teaching in schools. This is an entirely false claim. It is true that ...
... scholars and the general public ( especially when we consider that scholars have been insisting on objective description for so long - since the time of Trench and Müller ) . One reason for this is that ' mainstream ' linguistics ...
Contents
Standard English and the complaint tradition | |
Spoken and written norms | |
Grammar and speech | |
Linguistic prescription and the speech community | |
Linguistic repertoires and communicative competence | |
Planned and unplanned speech events | |
educational issues | |
the standard language ideology | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |