ABSTRACT
Many widely used languages, such as English, French and Spanish, are regarded as each possessing a standard variety, and this affects the manner in which speakers think about their own language and about language in general. We may say that speakers of such widely used languages, unlike speakers of some less well known languages, live in standard language cultures. In such cultures, language attitudes are dominated by powerful ideological positions that are largely based on the supposed existence of this standard form, and these, taken together, can be said to constitute the standard language ideology or ‘ideology of the standard language’. Speakers are not usually conscious that they are conditioned by these ideological positions: they usually believe their attitudes to language to be common sense and assume that virtually everyone agrees with them. We shall discuss this further below: first, we need an outline of the process that is involved in the standardization of a language.
