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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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.