‘Language Issues' after the ‘Language Question': On the Modern Standards of Standard Modern Greek *

According to a widely held view in sociolinguistic research, a standard language is neither a particular variety nor a well-defined process or practice. As James and Lesley Milroy have argued:

it seems more appropriate to speak more abstractly of standardization as an ideology, and a standard language as an idea in the mind rather than a reality – a set of abstract norms to which actual usage may conform to a greater or lesser extent. ¹