Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
When it comes to the relationship between language change and standardization,
it is important to point out that standardization represents an outcome of
active, purposeful interventions of groups or individuals in the process of language
maintenance or language change. These interventions are practically always
externally motivated; they are about language functions and domains, but
much more than that, they are about socio-political and scientific orientations
of language planners. In standard language cultures, interventions that brought
about standard languages are also used to form language ideologies which are
very often explicitly articulated by the language planners, presented in official
language policy documents and commented on in everyday laypersons’ discourse.
At the core of these ideologies is the concept of a single pure, correct
language variety, while all the other varieties of the same language are evaluated
as ‘incorrect’, ‘unacceptable’ ‘primitive’, etc. A great majority of speakers within
standard language cultures never questions such ‘linguistic correctness’ and does
not feel the need to justify it by logical or grammatical rules and interpretations:
Indeed all prescriptive arguments about correctness that depend on intra-linguistic
factors are post-hoc rationalizations (…). But an intra-linguistic rationalization is
not the reason why some usages are believed to be wrong. The reason is that it is
simply common sense: everybody knows it, it is part of the culture to know it, and
you are an outsider if you think otherwise: you are not a participant in the common
culture, and so your views can be dismissed (Milroy 2001: 536).
Language policy in standard language cultures can be defined as top-down
language policy, or language management, carried out from the heights of relevant
national institutions that use their authority to present the ‘correct language’
through prescriptive manuals and textbooks, grammars and language curricula in
formal education, thus making clear-cut decisions about the corpus of standard
languages. Such language policies more often than not do not have adequate capabilities
to recognize language changes which go hand-in-hand with the changes
of social structure within our societies and to propose and introduce corresponding
adaptations in the standard variety. If we agree that language is not a mere
reflection of our social relations, but rather one of the devices for their construction,
reconstruction or change, we can clearly see that top-down language policy
often stands in direct opposition to communicative and socio-cultural needs of
certain social groups.
In the following section, I would like to investigate whether language management,
i.e., language policy carried out through clearly visible externally authorized
managers, is the only way to update the corpora of standard language
cultures. I believe that contemporary science has the means to adopt and develop
alternative approaches to language policy and planning, which are not based on
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