Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

168 Language Planning and Education
6.4.2.4 The nature of the standard
So far, so clear. But there is another complicating factor – the marked uncertainty,
even with British Standard English let alone the New Englishes, as to how the
standard can be defined. And it is this, the nature of the standard rather than the
proposition that the standard should be taught in school that tends to be the locus
of the greatest controversy (see Crowley 2003: 254–7, who takes the authors of the
Kingman (1989) and Cox Reports (1991) to task for their confused use of the term
‘standard’).
Although this is not the place for an extended discussion of the standard there is
space for a few points, the first being that the standard is, as explained in Chapter 1,
more ‘an abstract idealisation than empirically verifiable reality’ (see Milroy, J. 1999).
It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that there should be dispute over the
boundaries of the standard. The second is that while the notion of a written standard
English is widely accepted, there is, Crowley (2003) remarks, far less consensus
regarding the existence of a spoken standard English:
When the leading experts in the field are consulted, however, the result is striking:
there is a lot of confusion, little consensus and a good deal of scepticism towards
the idea of ‘spoken standard English’. (Crowley 2003: 259)
In the ranks of the sceptical experts, one finds Carter (1999: 165), who – on the
basis of extensive study of constructions most typical of spontaneous speech –
concludes that it is worrying that the National Curriculum of England and Wales
should give so much attention to spoken standard English ‘when so little appears to
be known about what exactly it is and when it is defined only as “not speaking nonstandard
English”’; and Cheshire (1999: 129), who points out at the opening of her
discussion that ‘not only is the concept of spoken standard English problematic in
itself, but the grammatical structure of spoken English is far from being wellunderstood’.
There are others, however, equally expert (e.g. Quirk 1990b), who are
prepared to concede what is widely taken for granted in political discourse, the
existence, namely, of such a thing as spoken standard English, or at least, as Davies
(1999c: 177) puts it, that ‘the spoken language is not immune from standardisation
processes’.
In this zone of uncertainty there are, however, areas of relative consensus. It is
widely accepted, for instance, that there is no standard pronunciation, only more or
less prestigious accents, and that the concept of the standard has greatest clarity when
applied to the written language, and specifically to print English. Few, too, would
disagree with Gupta (2001: 320) when she argues that the concept of standardness
is relatively weak in phonology and lexis. Indeed Trudgill (1999: 17), in his protests
at the common confounding of formal or technical vocabulary with Standard
English, goes so far as to assert that ‘there is no such thing as Standard English
vocabulary’.
One implication of all this is that when we say the model of English adopted for
teaching in the outer circle is likely to be a standard variety, we refer primarily to the