ABSTRACT
Following Haugen’s (1966) analysis of the process of standardisation we come, after ‘selection’, ‘elaboration of function’ and ‘codification’, to the process of ‘acceptance’: the selected dialect has ultimately to be adopted by the relevant population as the principal language of the community, in the case of certain societies as the ‘national language’. Whereas ‘elaboration of function’ and ‘codification’ are processes bearing upon the linguistic corpus of that dialect, ‘selection’ and ‘acceptance’ are sociological processes, affecting its role and status in society. The distinction made here between ‘selection’ and ‘acceptance’ is useful as an expository device, but it is at bottom rather artificial. We saw in Chapter 4 how the variety current in the King’s Court was ‘selected’ (unconsciously) in the late twelfth century as the one to be developed into the standard language. Now, given that the very process of ‘selection’ of a prestige dialect implies an ‘acceptance’ of its special status by at least some speakers of other dialects, there is a sense in which its ‘acceptance’ (i.e. its functional, social and spatial diffusion) got under way in France as early as the twelfth century.
