Typically, the varieties that undergo standardization are those associated with centres of commerce and government,[4][2] used frequently by educated people and in news broadcasting, and taught widely in schools and to non-native learners of the language.
[9] Typically, standardization processes include efforts to stabilize the spelling of the prestige dialect, to codify usages and particular (denotative) meanings through formal grammars and dictionaries, and to encourage public acceptance of the codifications as intrinsically correct.
[12][13][14] Examples are English, French, Portuguese, German, Korean, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Swedish, Armenian and Mandarin Chinese.
[24] These conventions develop from related dialects, usually by social action (ethnic and cultural unification) that elevate discourse patterns associated with perceived centres of culture, or more rarely, by deliberately defining the norms of standard language with selected linguistic features drawn from the existing dialects, as in the case of Modern Hebrew.
[25][26] Either course of events typically results in a relatively fixed orthography codified in grammars and normative dictionaries, in which users can also sometimes find illustrative examples drawn from literary, legal, or religious texts.
[27] Effects of such codifications include slowing the pace of diachronic change in the standardized variety and affording a basis for further linguistic development (Ausbau).
[30][28] A standard variety can be conceptualized in two ways: (i) as the sociolect of a given socio-economic stratum or (ii) as the normative codification of a dialect, an idealized abstraction.
[32][33] In practice, the language varieties identified as standard are neither uniform nor fully stabilized, especially in their spoken forms.
[39] Moreover, in political praxis, either a government or a neighbouring population might deny the cultural status of a standard language.
[40] In response to such political interference, linguists develop a standard variety from elements of the different dialects used by a society.
Based upon the bourgeois speech of the capital Oslo (Christiania) and other major cities, several orthographic reforms, notably in 1907 and 1917, resulted in the official standard Riksmål, in 1929 renamed Bokmål ('book tongue').
The philologist Ivar Aasen (1813–1896) considered urban and upper-class Dano-Norwegian too similar to Danish, so he developed Landsmål ('country tongue'), the standard based upon the dialects of western Norway.
Likewise, in Yugoslavia (1945–1992), when the Socialist Republic of Macedonia (1963–1991) developed their national language from the dialect continuum demarcated by Serbia to the north and Bulgaria to the east, their Standard Macedonian was based upon vernaculars from the west of the republic, which were the dialects most linguistically different from standard Bulgarian, the previous linguistic norm used in that region of the Balkan peninsula.
[41] Chinese consists of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible, usually classified into seven to ten major groups, including Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Hakka and Min.
[48] In the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Standard English became established as the linguistic norm of the upper class, composed of the peerage and the gentry.
[64] In Brazil, actors and journalists usually adopt an unofficial, but de facto, spoken standard of Brazilian Portuguese, originally derived from the middle-class dialects of Rio de Janeiro and Brasília, but that now encompasses educated urban pronunciations from the different speech communities in the southeast.
The sociolect of prestige of mineiro spoken in the capital of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, is the accent from Brazilian Portuguese that is the nearest to sotaque neutro.