Beyond and within standard English: Categories, category boundaries and fuzziness

Abstract

Standard dialects are frequently thought of as fixed and stable entities which possess clear boundaries and a set of criteria that allow us to recognise easily which texts or utterances are standard and which are not. This view, as has been proved by sociolinguists, is an oversimplification and idealisation since real-world standard dialects are best viewed both as fuzzy categories and as members of a large category centred around a prototype. The paper attempts to present a view of standard dialects inspired by the prototype theory and present-day sociolinguistics and exemplify this view by means of Standard British English. The analysis presents the notion of category in Standard English at three levels. Firstly, particular fragments of texts and utterances cannot be shown to be doubtlessly standard or non-standard, this issue being further complicated by the frequent confusion of typically spoken and typically written norms. Secondly, Standard English cannot be treated as a fixed entity because of its optional variability, its diversity in terms of style and register and the considerable number of local standard varieties of English throughout the English-speaking world. Finally, considering Standard English as possessing a long history of continued development towards minimal variation in form and maximal variation in function is also an idealisation of what has actually been a more complex process, in particular because, as linguists agree, language standardisation is not a fact but a process. All this leads to the conclusion that standard dialects can be analysed in terms of cognitive categorisation and prototypicality.