Standard English

In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone codification to the point of being socially perceived as the standard language, associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record, etc.^[1] All linguistic features are subject to the effects of standardisation, including morphology, phonology, syntax, lexicon, register, discourse markers, pragmatics, as well as written features such as spelling conventions, punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation practices. SE is local to nowhere: its grammatical and lexical components are no longer regionally marked, although many of them originated in different, non-adjacent dialects, and it has very little of the variation found in spoken or earlier written varieties of English. According to Peter Trudgill, Standard English is a social dialect pre-eminently used in writing that is distinguishable from other English dialects largely by a small group of grammatical "idiosyncrasies", such as irregular reflexive pronouns and an "unusual" present-tense verb morphology.^[2]

The term "Standard" refers to the regularisation of the grammar, spelling, usages of the language and not to minimal desirability or interchangeability (e.g., a standard measure).^[3] For example, there are substantial differences among the language varieties that countries of the Anglosphere identify as "standard English": in England and Wales, the term Standard English identifies British English, the Received Pronunciation accent, and the grammar and vocabulary of United Kingdom Standard English (UKSE); in Scotland, the variety is Scottish English; in the United States, the General American variety is the spoken standard; and in Australia, the standard English is General Australian.^[4] By virtue of a phenomenon sociolinguists call "elaboration of function",^[5] specific linguistic features attributed to a standardised dialect become associated with nonlinguistic social markers of prestige (like wealth or education). The standardised dialect itself, in other words, is not linguistically superior to other dialects of English used by an Anglophone society.^[6]

Unlike with some other standard languages, there is no national academy or international academy with ultimate authority to codify Standard English; its codification is thus only by widespread prescriptive consensus. The codification is therefore not exhaustive or unanimous, but it is extensive and well-documented.