Informal Consensus.

Another possible model for language standardization is an informal consensus model, where a small but influential body of people (poets, intellectuals, writers) come to agree on the choice of a norm without any formal decision-making whatsoever. This kind of linguistic decision-making is less well-understood, because it is only noticed retrospectively, after it happens. The participants may not be conscious of what they are doing, but if we follow the accommodation theory of Giles et al. (1991), we can see this as a kind of accommodation going on--people are making adjustments in their habits and tailoring their linguistic production to their perceptions of what their hearers/interlocutors want to hear. This kind of standardization is more likely to be what happens in the choice of spoken norms, than in the choice of written norms. It occurs to me that it is what is responsible for the choice of the spoken norm known as RP, the British Received Pronunciation, (also known as RSE, or Received Standard English) since that apparently emerged in the British Public (i.e. private) schools in the 18th and 19th centuries as those schools came to prominence. Generations of British leaders were trained in those schools, and there was remarkable consensus about what the RP norm was like; yet no-one had to issue edicts or officially declare any standards about pronunciation. There was already an agreed-upon grammatical and syntactic system for standard English, but how this was pronounced was not, in the early days, explicitly standardized. Gradually, RP became to some extent a standardized pronunciation, though many experts now disagree about how extensive this was.

Similarly, in America a grammatical/syntactic system of English quite similar to that used in Britain continued to be agreed upon after the American revolution (probably because of the ``standardization" of the English Bible) with spellings influenced by Webster's dictionary, and disseminated by McGuffy's Readers. By the end of the 19th century a pronunciation norm for public speaking (preaching, oratory) held sway, based on the speech of products of prestigious eastern seminaries and colleges (Harvard, Princeton, Yale) and the New York stage; and, as far as the pronunciation of final r's is concerned, was quite similar to the southern British norm. In the early twentieth century, however, this norm gave way, and sometime between the two World Wars another model emerged, this time a rhotic (r-pronouncing) one. This model was without much doubt disseminated by radio, and within a generation, was also the norm in talking movies and television. It is known as `broadcast standard' and its best representation is the speech of news presenters on national networks, especially when reading from texts (i.e. not speaking extemporaneously.) Commercial radio broadcasting in the US never set any standards for its announcers; there was no central ownership, no state-owned broadcasting system; there was never a school, a rule-book, nor a pronunciation guide (unlike there is for the announcers of the BBC, the CBC, the NHK etc.) The Broadcast Standard, because of its rhoticism, sounds more like `mid-western' styles of speech, though this seems so more to eastern-seaboard speakers than to midwesterners. It is probably closest to the educated speech of Americans from large northeastern cities other than New York, Boston and other non-rhotic areas. Together with the evolution of RP, American Broadcast Standard evolved without conscious control, yet both display remarkable uniformity.

I claim that Standard Spoken Tamil (SST) also emerged via an informal decision-making process, similar to the way British RP and American Broadcast Standard evolved, but included in it was decision-making about the grammar and syntax as well, not just the pronunciation. After a certain consensus was reached on the broad features of SST, it could become the natural choice for use in the ``social" film, and was thus disseminated widely to all Tamil speakers everywhere, serving both as a model of ``correct" speech (spoken by the central characters, the hero and heroine) while character actors cast as buffoons and rustics provided models of ``incorrect" speech; the ``Jerry Lewis" character Nagesh was famous for this in the Tamil film; other linguistic cultures have their own equivalents.

These days it is fashionable in many circles in the west to deny both the existence and the legitimacy of standard English or other standard languages, because standards have often been used capriciously, and maliciously, to deny non-standard speakers access to power etc. Therefore we now hear and see a great deal about hegemony, power imbalance, linguistic prejudice, maintenance/denial of privilege, empowerment, and many other descriptions of ideological control of language. And indeed, much wider tolerance is now permitted in how standard Englishes, whether American, British or other varieties, are pronounced, although there seems to be less tolerance in news broadcasting, for example, for non- standard grammatical forms such as negative concord (known popularly as `double negatives'). And of course in broadcasting, different levels are recognized for news readers, sports announcers, talk-show hosts, cartoon characters, and other informal usage.

As anyone who has ever had to teach a language knows, however, choices have to be made as to which forms to teach; pedagogically it is simply unworkable to accept any and all utterances students produce, so teachers, especially language teachers, find it essential to adhere more or less strictly to one set of forms rather than allow variation in students' writing and speech.

New ways probably need to be devised to broaden the concept of standardization, to allow for variation, perhaps in register and domain, without giving up the whole notion of having a form of language of widest communication, or the utility of some kinds of agreed-upon understandings. Too often, standard grammars are in fact norms for written language, but this gets forgotten when spoken language is taught, as it is today. Computerization alone will demand various things; just try your spell checker (which also checks your grammar) and see if you agree with the kinds of decisions it makes about your usage. The fact is that when all is said and done, speakers of all natural languages make judgments about different kinds of speech and writing that they hear and see samples of, and some of those judgments are, like it or not, hierarchical social judgments. There seem to exist understandings, a whole network of understandings of what is appropriate speech/writing, and what is not. Another way of putting it is that there can exist forms of speech and writing which evoke no particularism; they do not remind us of any region or social class, and they do not immediately mark their user as a member of any particular class, caste, or ethnic group (other than the class of educated speakers). They convey content without calling attention to the form. Understandings exist as to which form does this `best'; understandings can, of course, also break down. In order to get a grasp on whether my own students have any consensus of what a non-particular form (``standard") might be, I have undertaken informal surveys about their linguistic preferences. I find that students who attack the notion of standard English do so mostly for their own convenience, not for the supposed benefit of subaltern non-standard speakers of the English language. They wish to be able to speak and write any way they please, but conversely they also wish to receive written and spoken English communication in a standard form, as I have ascertained by testing their tolerance for messages (e.g. telephone information messages, pharmaceutical labels on medication, airline emergency evacuation announcements, etc.) delivered in non-standard forms.

In any event, the issue of standardization has become highly politicized in this day and age, perhaps more so than in some other periods, but perhaps not. The fact that in practically no society do people actually use language according to the rules that have been devised, rules which often date from a previous era, is given as evidence on the one hand for either:

1.

Total decay and ruination of the language, leading to illogical thinking, moral turpitude, and the decline of civilization; or

2.

Evidence that there really is no such thing as a standard language, the notion being kept alive only to benefit an elite ruling class, a small coterie of mandarins, or whatever, who in any event behind closed doors don't use the standard language either.

In the Tamil context, both of these arguments are used; the first to validate the notion that the spoken varieties of Tamil are corrupt, decadent, and worthless, and the second (partially) to challenge the idea that there might be an alternative to the rigid literary standard. The essential thing to consider about standard language is that all of the above can be true, and that there is still something useful to be said for it. Standards do change; words, phrases, spellings that were highly stigmatized when I was a child have now become commonplace, and phrases I never thought I would utter I now hear coming from my own son's mouth. People now regularly split their infinitives, dangle their participles, and end sentences with a preposition. Most speakers of American English now use the form `you guys' as the plural of `you', a form that was highly stigmatized when I was a child, and which I must remind my son not to use with his grandparents. We must remember, however, to distinguish between style and grammar; much of what is considered ungrammatical is actually different in style, since grammar by definition is the structure inherent in a language. If people use their language and are understood every day without miscommunicating, they are speaking grammatically.

Some three or four decades ago an American cigarette commercial used the phrase ``Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." English teachers were up in arms about this ``error": one was supposed to say "...as a cigarette should," etc. Later the Winston people capitalized on the furor by airing another commercial: ``What do you want, good grammar or good taste?" Some people may not like the use of `like' for `as' but it is hard to call this a grammatical error. In other words, what may have once been considered ungrammatical may in a latter day have to be called a stylistic difference. And no matter whether the word `standard' has become the whipping-boy of post-modernist culture-critics, there are nevertheless `understandings' that people in various societies have about what kind of language is acceptable, and what is unacceptable, and what different kinds of language are for.

What teachers need to have is a framework to adhere to, so that they can be fair in their determination of what is acceptable and what is not; otherwise grading, promotion, everything they do will be capricious. But they also need to know the difference between style, register, and grammar, and be able to teach it. They need to distinguish between formal styles of a language and informal varieties, between expository writing and creative writing, and be able to convey this to their students.