Language Standard(s)

Abstract

International audience ; Language standardization is approached here through the main debates that inform reflection on majority and minority language standardization in Europe and beyond. Beyond the main contemporary debates, it frames standardization as the outcome of a unique historical, philosophical, and political project that originates in seventeenth-century Europe and which sought to stabilize knowledge beyond the divergences between Protestants and Catholics that had led to war and destruction throughout the century. Standard languages are, in that sense, the descendants of the early attempts to create universal language schemes devoid of indexicals of place and social or religious origins. This entry also asks if those processes, born among speakers of now dominant European languages, can be transposed to minority language settings worldwide.