Though a distinction is often made between status planning and corpus
planning, in fact corpus planning
may also be viewed as a collection of decisions about the status of
individual elements of the corpus of the language: this pronunciation is
preferred over that; this spelling is correct and that is not; this
plural-marker or past-tense form is preferred over that; this syntactic
construction is ``valorized" and that is ``stigmatized". When all these
status decisions
have been made, the corpus has
been ``standardized". It may then be disseminated through printing (the
Bible, the Quran), through its use in royal or other administrative
edicts (Charlemagne's grandsons' Strasbourg Oaths, the edicts of
Asoka) or nowadays, as the form of language taught in schools
(Malaysia, Norway). The set of decisions may sometimes be summarized in
the form of a (prescriptive) grammar.
As Garvin (1964) points
out, decisions about standardization may get made, and perhaps even
published, but dissemination of the results may fail; i.e. the standard
may fail to be implemented, and implementation may in fact be the
Achilles heel of most language planning. Garvin's requirement that there
be flexible stability means that there should be some stability, usually
through printing of a dictionary, spelling book, or reference grammar.
But it must also be flexible, allowing for eventual revisions, addition
of vocabulary, and adaptation to more modern technology. Garvin also
posited four functions of a standard language:
Tamil already has a prestigeous literary language; this is thus not an issue here; rather, capturing some of the prestige for the spoken language is a problem.
As far as this affects Spoken Tamil, one needs an objective standard for what would or not be considered `correct', but it is not necessary for poetry, since the older norms dominate the domain of poetry.
As is obvious, some of these apply to the development of SST and some do
not; since Tamil already has a written standard (LT) some of these do not
apply and will not unless SST captures domains currently dominated by LT.
It must also be noted that LT is not a unitary norm; there are many
varieties of LT, some extremely conservative or archaicizing, but since
Tamil culture conceives of the language as being only one (rather than
multiple stages or varieties) taking refuge in the archaic style is often
the strongest defense of the recalcitrant resisters to modernization:
they can so easily demonstrate how modern spoken forms are totally
inappropriate for something like religious usage.