Стандартизированный вариант английского языка.

Substantially regularised variety of English

In an English speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone substantial regularisation and is associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record, etc. All linguistic features are subject to the effects of standardisation, including morphology, phonology, syntax, lexicon, register, discourse markers, pragmatics, as well as written features such as spelling conventions, punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation practices. 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. According to Peter Trudgill, Standard English is a social dialect pre eminently used in writing that is distinguishable from other English dialects largely by a small group of grammatical "idiosyncrasies", such as irregular reflexive pronouns and an "unusual" present tense verb morphology. The term "Standard" refers to the regularisation of the grammar, spelling, usages of the language and not to minimal desirability or interchangeability (e. g., a standard measure). For example, there are substantial differences among the language varieties that countries of the Anglosphere identify as "standard English": in England and Wales, the term Standard English identifies British English, the Received Pronunciation accent, and the grammar and vocabulary of United Kingdom Standard English (UKSE); in Scotland, the variety is Scottish English; in the United States, the General American variety is the spoken standard; and in Australia, the standard English is General Australian. By virtue of a phenomenon sociolinguists call "elaboration of function", specific linguistic features attributed to a standardised dialect become associated with nonlinguistic social markers of prestige (like wealth or education). The standardised dialect itself, in other words, is not linguistically superior to other dialects of English used by an Anglophone society. Unlike with some other standard languages, there is no national academy or international academy with ultimate authority to codify Standard English; its codification is thus only by widespread prescriptive consensus. The codification is therefore not exhaustive or unanimous, but it is extensive and well documented.

Although standard English is usually associated with official communications and settings, it is diverse in registers (stylistic levels), such as those for journalism (print, television, internet) and for academic publishing (monographs, academic papers, internet). This diversity in registers also exists between the spoken and the written forms of SE, which are characterised by degrees of formality; therefore, Standard English is distinct from formal English, because it features stylistic variations, ranging from casual to formal. 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. Countries in which English is neither indigenous nor widely spoken as an additional language may import a variety of English via instructional materials (typically British English or American English) and consider it "standard" for teaching and assessment purposes. Typically, British English is taught as standard across Europe, the Caribbean, sub Saharan Africa, and South Asia, and American English is taught as standard across Latin America and East Asia. This does, however, vary between regions and individual teachers. In some areas a pidgin or creole language blends English with one or more native languages.

Although the standard Englishes of the anglophone countries are similar, there are minor grammatical differences and divergences of vocabulary among the varieties. In American and Australian English, for example, "sunk" and "shrunk" as past tense forms of "sink" and "shrink" are acceptable as standard forms, whereas standard British English retains only the past tense forms of "sank" and "shrank". In Afrikaner South African English, the deletion of verbal complements is becoming common. This phenomenon sees the objects of transitive verbs being omitted: "Did you get? ", "You can put in the box". This kind of construction is infrequent in most other standardised varieties of English.

In the past, different scholars have meant different things by the phrase 'Standard English', when describing its emergence in medieval and early modern England. In the nineteenth century, it tended to be used in relation to the wordstock. Nineteenth century scholars Earle and Kington Oliphant 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. Subsequently, attention shifted to the regional distribution of phonemes. Morsbach, Heuser and Ekwall 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 continued to focus on the distribution of spelling practice but as primary artefacts, which are not necessarily evidence of underlying articulatory reality. Their work led to the publication of the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, which aims to describe dialectal variation in Middle English between 1350 and 1450. The final date was chosen to reflect the increasing standardisation of written English. Although as they note, "The dialects of the spoken language did not die out, but those of the written language did". A number of late twentieth century scholars tracked morphemes as they standardised, such as auxiliary do, third person present tense s, you/thou, the wh pronouns, and single negation, multiple negations being common in Old and Middle English and remaining so in spoken regional varieties of English.

In the twenty first century, scholars consider all of the above and more, including the rate of standardisation across different text types such as administrative documents; the role of the individual in spreading standardisation; the influence of multilingual and mixed language writing; the influence of the Book of Common Prayer; standardisation of the wordstock; evolution of technical registers; standardisation of morphemes; standardisation of letter graphs, and the partial standardisation of Older Scots.

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. The first variety of English to be called a "standard literary language" was the West Saxon variety of Old English. However, Lucia Kornexl defines the classification of Late West Saxon Standard as rather constituting a set of orthographic norms than a standardised dialect, as there was no such thing as standardisation of Old English in the modern sense: Old English did not standardise in terms of reduction of variation, reduction of regional variation, selection of word stock, standardisation of morphology or syntax, or use of one dialect for all written purposes everywhere. The Norman Conquest of 1066 decreased the usage of Old English, but it was still used in parts of the country for at least another century.

Following the changes brought about by the Norman Conquest of 1066, England became a trilingual society. Literate people wrote in Medieval Latin and Anglo Norman French more than they wrote in monolingual English. 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 as mixed language, and it became the later fourteenth and fifteenth century norm for accounts, inventories, testaments and personal journals. The mixed language system was abandoned over the fifteenth century, and at different times in different places, it became replaced by monolingual supralocal English, although it was not always a straightforward exchange. For example, Alcolado Carnicero 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. Individual scribes spent whole careers in the mixed language stage, with no knowledge that monolingual English would be the eventual outcome and that it was in fact a stage of transition. 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.

From the 1370s, monolingual Middle English was used increasingly, mainly for local communication. Up until the later fifteenth century, it was characterised by great regional and spelling variation. After the middle of the fifteenth century, supralocal monolingual varieties of English began to evolve for numerous pragmatic functions. Supralocalisation is where "dialect features with a limited geographical distribution are replaced by features with a wider distribution". Over the later fifteenth century, individuals began to restrict their spelling ratios, selecting fewer variants. Anglo Norman was the variety of French that was widely used by the educated classes in late medieval England. It was used, for example, as the teaching language in grammar schools. 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. Ingham analysed how Anglo Norman syntax and morphology written in Britain began to differ from Anglo Norman syntax and morphology written on the Continent from the 1370s onwards until the language fell out of use in Britain in the 1430s. After the last quarter of the fourteenth century Anglo Norman written in England displayed the kind of grammatical levelling which occurs as the result of language acquired in adulthood, and deduces that the use of Anglo Norman in England as a spoken vehicle for teaching in childhood must have ceased around the end of the fourteenth century. An examination of 7,070 Hampshire administrative (episcopal, municipal, manorial) documents written 1399–1525 showed that Anglo Norman ceased to be used after 1425. and texts from Cambridge were less regionally marked than those from the surrounding Midlands and East Anglian areas. 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. Communities of practice such as accountants auditing income and outgoings, merchants keeping track of wares and payments, and lawyers writing letters on behalf of clients, led to the development of specific writing conventions for specific spheres of activity. English letter writers 1424–1474 in one community of practice (estate administrators) reduced spelling variation in words of Romance origin but not in words of English origin, reflecting the pragmatics of law and administration, which had previously been the domain of Anglo Norman and mixed language. Examples of multiregional morphemes are auxiliary do from south western dialects and third person present tense s and plural are from northern ones. Standard English retains multiregional spellings such as cudgel (Old English cycgel), bridge (Old English brycg), merry (Old English myrig). Unlike earlier twentieth century histories of standardisation , 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. Such multiregionalisms in Standard English are explained by the fifteenth century countrywide expansion of business, trade and commerce, with linguistic elements passed around communities of practice and along weak tie trade networks, both orally and in writing.

Although the following hypotheses have now been superseded, they still prevail in literature aimed at students. However more recent handbook accounts such as those of Ursula Schaeffer and Joan C. Beal explain that they are insufficient.

Bror Eilert Ekwall).

Michael Louis Samuels examining Type 1, ('Central Midland Standard') spelling ratios in the orthography of 68 hands who wrote manuscripts of the Later Version of the Wycliffite Bible, concluded: "it is difficult to sustain a 'grand unifying theory' about Central Midland Standard". Jacob Thaisen analysing the orthography of texts forming Type 2 found no consistent similarities between different scribes' spelling choices and no obvious overlap of selection signalling incipient standardisation, concluding "it is time to lay the types to rest". Simon Horobin examining spelling in Type 3 texts reported "such variation warns us against viewing these types of London English as discrete we must view Samuels' typology as a linguistic continuum rather than as a series of discrete linguistic varieties".

Samuels's Type IV, dating after 1435, was labelled by Samuels 'Chancery Standard' because it was supposedly the dialect in which letters from the King's Office of Chancery supposedly emanated. John H. Fisher and his collaborators asserted that the orthography of a selection of documents including Signet Letters of Henry V, copies of petitions sent to the Court of Chancery, and indentures now kept in The National Archives, constituted what he called "Chancery English". This orthographical practice was supposedly created by the government of Henry V, and was supposedly the precursor of Standard English. However, this assertion attracted strong objections, such as those made by Norman Davis, T. Haskett, R. J. Watts, and Reiko Takeda. Takeda points out that "the language of the documents displays much variation and it is not clear from the collection what exactly 'Chancery English' is, linguistically" (for a critique of Fisher's assertions, see Takeda. who calls his scholarship "uninformed not only philologically but historically". Gwilym Dodd 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. Scribes working for the Crown wrote in Latin, but scribes working for individuals petitioning the king – it is likely that individuals engaged professionals to write on their behalf, but who these scribes were is not usually known – wrote in French before the first third of the fifteenth century, and after that date in English. As with mixed language writing, there followed decades of switching back and forth before the Crown committed to writing in monolingual English so that the first English royal letter of 1417 did not signal a wholesale switchover. Latin was still the dominant language in the second half of the fifteenth century. As Merja Stenroos put it, "the main change was the reduction in the use of French, and the long term development was towards more Latin, not less. On the whole, the output of government documents in English continued to be small compared to Latin."

With rare exceptions, Standard Englishes use either American or British spelling systems, or a mixture of the two (such as in Australian English and Canadian English). British spellings usually dominate in Commonwealth countries.