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.
[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).
[7] Furthermore, the usage codes of nonstandard dialects (vernacular language) are less stabilised than the codifications of Standard English, and thus more readily accept and integrate new vocabulary and grammatical forms.
Functionally, the national varieties of SE are characterised by generally accepted rules, often grammars established by linguistic prescription in the 18th century.
English is the first language of the majority of the population in a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas and Barbados and is an official language in many others, including India, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa and Nigeria; each country has a standard English with a grammar, spelling and pronunciation particular to the local culture.
Nineteenth-century scholars Earle[12] and Kington-Oliphant[13] conceived of the standardisation of English in terms of ratios of Romance to Germanic vocabulary.
Earle claimed that the works of the poets Gower and Chaucer, for instance, were written in what he called 'standard language' because of their amounts of French-derived vocabulary.
Morsbach,[14] Heuser[15] and Ekwall[16] conceived of standardisation largely as relating to sound-change, especially as indicated by spellings for vowels in stressed syllables, with a lesser emphasis on morphology.
Mid-twentieth-century scholars McIntosh and Samuels[17] continued to focus on the distribution of spelling practice but as primary artefacts, which are not necessarily evidence of underlying articulatory reality.
[34] After the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great and his successors, the West Saxon variety of Old English began to influence writing practices in other parts of England.
In addition, a widely used system developed which mixed several languages together, typically with Medieval Latin as the grammatical basis, adding in nouns, noun-modifiers, compound-nouns, verb-stems and -ing forms from Anglo-Norman French and Middle English.
This mixing of the three in a grammatically regular system is known to modern scholars[38][39][40] as mixed-language, and it became the later fourteenth and fifteenth-century norm for accounts, inventories, testaments and personal journals.
For example, Alcolado-Carnicero[41] surveyed the London Mercers' Livery Company Wardens' Accounts and found that they switched back and forth for over seventy years between 1390 and 1464 before finally committing to monolingual English.
For much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, writing in mixed-language was the professional norm in money-related text types, providing a conduit for the borrowing of Anglo-Norman vocabulary into English.
After the middle of the fifteenth century, supralocal monolingual varieties of English began to evolve for numerous pragmatic functions.
[27] However, each scribe made individual selections so that the pool of possible variants per feature still remained wide at the turn of the sixteenth century.
For example, the Benedictine monk Ranulph Higden, who wrote the widely copied historical chronicle Polychronicon, remarks that, against the practice of other nations, English children learn Latin grammar in French.
More oral, less predictable texts were aimed at non-professionals as correspondence, ordinances, oaths, conditions of obligation, and occasional leases and sales.
[47] As people in cities and towns increasingly did business with each other, words, morphemes and spelling-sequences were transferred around the country by means of speaker-contact, writer-contact and the repeat back-and-forth encounters inherent in trading activity, from places of greater density to those of lower.
Members of the gentry and professionals, in contradistinction to the nobility and lower commoners, were the main users of French suffixes in a survey of the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, 1410–1681.
Unlike earlier twentieth-century histories of standardisation (see below), it is no longer felt necessary to posit unevidenced migrations of peoples to account for movement of words, morphemes and spelling conventions from the provinces into Standard English.
Bror Eilert Ekwall[16] hypothesised that Standard English developed from the language of upper-class East Midland merchants who influenced speakers in the City of London.
Thus his dataset was very limited, by 'standard' he meant a few spellings and morphemes rather than a dialect per se, his data did not support migration from the East Midlands, and he made unsupported assumptions about the influence of the speech of the upper classes (details in Laura Wright 2020[52]).
Gwilym Dodd[63][64][65] has shown that most letters written by scribes from the Office of Chancery were in Medieval Latin and that petitions to the Crown shifted from Anglo-Norman French before c. 1425 to monolingual English around the middle of the century.