Vernacular Language Vs Standardized Language

Vernacular Language
The term vernacular is used in a number of ways. It generally refers to a language which has not
been standardized and which does not have official status. There are hundreds of vernacular
languages, such as Buang in Papua New Guinea, Hindustani in India and Bumbar in Vanuatu,
many of which have never been written down or described. In a multilingual speech community,
the many different ethnic or tribal languages used by different groups are referred to as
vernacular languages. Vernaculars are usually the first languages learned by people in
multilingual communities, and they are often used for a relatively narrow range of informal
functions.
There are three components of the meaning of the term vernacular, then. The most basic refers to
the fact that a vernacular is an uncodified or unstandardized variety. The second refers to the way
it is acquired – in the home, as a first variety. The third is the fact that it is used for relatively
circumscribed functions. The first component has been most widely used as the defining
criterion, but emphasis on one or other of the components has led to the use of the term
vernacular with somewhat different meanings. Some have extended the term to refer to any
language which is not the official language of a country. An influential 1951 Unesco report, for
instance, defined a vernacular language as the first language of a group socially or politically
dominated by a group with a different language. So, in countries such as the USA where English
is the language of the dominant group, a language like Spanish is referred to as a Chicano child’s
vernacular. But Spanish would not be regarded as a vernacular language in Spain, Uruguay, or
Chile, where it is an official language. In this sense, Greek is a vernacular language in Australia
and New Zealand, but not in Greece or Cyprus. The term vernacular simply means a language
which is not an official language in a particular context. When people talk about education in a
vernacular language, for instance, they are usually referring to education in an ethnic minority
language in a particular country.
Finally, the term vernacular is sometimes used to indicate that a language is used for everyday
interaction, without implying that it is appropriate only in informal domains. Hebrew, for
example, used to be a language of ritual and religion with no native speakers. It was no one’s
‘parental tongue’ and was certainly not considered a vernacular language. Sociolinguists have
described the process of developing it for use as the national language of Israel as
‘vernacularisation’. Its functions were extended from exclusively H functions to include L
functions. From being a language of ritual, Hebrew became a language of everyday
communication – a vernacular language. In this sense, vernacular contrasts with ritual or
classical language. The Catholic church at one time used Latin for church services, rather than
vernacular languages such as English, French and Italian. Using this definition, any language
which has native speakers would be considered a vernacular. This is a very broad definition, and
it is generally not as useful as the more specific definition which contrasts vernacular languages
with standardized languages used for more formal functions.
Standardized Language
This is a very general definition and it immediately excludes most of the world’s four or five
thousand languages. Only a minority of the world’s languages are written, and an even smaller
minority are standardized in the sense of codified and accepted by the community as suitable for
formal functions. It will be useful to look at an example to illustrate what the definition means in
a particular context. Standard English emerged ‘naturally’ in the fifteenth century from a variety
of regional English dialects, largely because it was the variety used by the English Court and the
influential merchants of London, as Puttenham noted. The area where the largest proportion of
the English population lived at that time was in a neat triangle containing London, where the
Court was based, and the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. In addition, the East Midlands
was an important agricultural and business area, and London was the hub of international trade
and exports to Calais. It was also the center of political, social and intellectual life in England.
So, it was the dialect used in this area which was the basis for what we now think of as standard
English. It was prestigious because of its use in Court. It was influential because it was used by
the economically powerful merchant class. People who came to London from the provinces
recognized this and often learned it, and this of course made it useful. The more people who used
it, the less effort people had to make to understand regional varieties. It is easy to see how such a
code would rapidly develop formal H functions in the context of administration and government.
Standard varieties are codified varieties. Codification is usually achieved through grammars and
dictionaries which record, and sometimes prescribe, the standard forms of the language.
Dictionary writers (or lexicographers) have to decide which words to include in the dictionary as
part of the standard variety, which forms to mark as dialectal, and which to omit altogether. They
generally take the usage of educated and socially prestigious members of the community as their
criterion. The codification process, which is part of the development of every standard variety,
was accelerated in the case of English by the introduction of printing. In 1476, William Caxton,
the first English printer, set up his printing press in Westminster. He used the speech of the
London area – the newly emerging standard dialect – as the basis for his translations. In other
words, he used the vocabulary, the grammar and the pronunciation of this dialect when looking
for words, constructions and spellings to translate works from French. Selecting forms was not
always straightforward, however. Caxton comments, for instance, on the problems of deciding
between egges and eyren , alternative forms used for ‘eggs’ at the time. This choice involved
grammar as well as pronunciation since these forms represented alternative ways of pluralizing
words (the -en plural marker has survived in oxen , for instance). Like other codifiers, he
reported that he consulted the best writers of the upper class for judgments on usage problems.
The development of standard English illustrates the three essential criteria which characterize a
standard: it was an influential or prestigious variety, it was codified and stabilized and it served
H functions in that it was used for communication at Court, for literature and for administration.
It also illustrates that what we refer to as a standard language is always a particular dialect which
has gained its special position as a result of social, economic and political influences. A standard
dialect has no particular linguistic merits, whether in vocabulary, grammar or pronunciation. It is
simply the dialect of those who are politically powerful and socially prestigious. Once it begins
to serve as a norm or standard for a wider group, however, it is likely to develop the wider
vocabulary needed to express the new functions it is required to serve. Standard languages
developed in a similar way in many other European countries during the fifteenth, sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In Italy, Spain, France and Romania, for example, there were a variety of
dialects of the vernacular languages (which all derived from varieties of colloquial Latin) which
served the L functions of their communities, alongside classical Latin, the H language. From
these dialects there gradually emerged a standard, generally based on the dialect of the political,
economic, and social center of the country. Some dialects had extra help – the Italians, for
example, established a language academy as early as 1582 to make pronouncements on what
counted as standard Italian – but most were natural births.
Taken from Janet Holmes. Introduction to Sociolinguistic, 2013 page 77-80.

Vernacular Language Vs Standardized Language

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Vernacular Language

Taken from Janet Holmes. Introduction to Sociolinguistic, 2013 page 77-80.

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