The Linguistic Effects of Language Regulation

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2015
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
Language standardization, defined as the codification of a vareity in order to meet the needs of a growing and modernizing speaker community, is an important aspect of the sociolinguistic situations of languages throughout the world. Standardization is meant to provide a uniform variety that fosters communication between disparate groups. Though standardization is meant to facilitate communication and understanding, it has received criticism due to its associations with linguistic prescriptivism, arbitrarily identifying certain linguistic features as superior, and for its tendency to provide advantage to certain sociolinguistic groups, deligitimizing the speech of others and marginalizing those who do not conform to the standards. Societies enforce standardization in several ways. Education typically furthers the goal of standardization by exposing students to standard languages and demanding fluency in them. Education is often a site of marginalization, as students who do not natively speak mainstream varieties may be punished for their non-conformity. Regulatory agencies such as the Royal Spanish Academy and the French Academy publish prescriptive materials to regulate standard language. Some agencies have legislative power or oversee the use of language in official situations, granting political status to the standard language. However, it is possible that standardization is not meeting its goals of uniformity and improved communication. If this is the case, the negative effects of standardization may outweigh the benefits. In order to explore whether standardization actually produces more uniform varieties, I analyze the text-to-text similarity of the Wikipedia web encyclopedia to test whether speakers of more strongly enforced standard langauges tend to write in a more uniform manner than speakers of other languages. Wikipedia is an ideal corpus, because it consists largely of semi-formal language and represents a wide variety of languages. Though the methods I use are not capable of conclusively determining all of the linguistic effects of standardization, they do suggest that the effects of standardization on certain aspects of syntax, word choice, and semantics are minimal. Speakers of all languages, regardless of measures in place to promote standardization, seem to be equally similar in terms of their lexicons and syntactic preferences.
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