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The applied linguistics challenge THE STANDARD LANGUAGE

المؤلف:  Alan Davies

المصدر:  An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P154-C8

2026-08-05

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The applied linguistics challenge

THE STANDARD LANGUAGE

Both the SLA/psycholinguistic/cognitive view and the sociolinguistic conceptualization of the NS are in the end idealizations. Indeed, Trudgill’s definition is not after all about an individual since no individual has a language as their first language; what we all have as our first language is an idiolect, our own identifying idiolect which distinguishes us from everyone else, even from our own siblings. It is in applied linguistics that real interest in the NS resides, applied linguistics because that is the field where judgements, goals and norms have a central place (Davies forthcoming) and where the standard language finds its home. For the standard language is itself an idealization, the goal of education both for L1 and L2, taken for granted by SLA researchers, the prototype for sociolinguistics. We can equate the public persona of the NS with the standard language: that is what near-nativeness is compared with, that is the goal of the second-language learner.

As such we can adopt the Barthian position and settle for self-ascription, buttressed by Ernest Gellner’s functional view of nationalism. Societies, Gellner argues, are to be explained ‘in terms of the synchronic interaction of institutions rather than in terms of the past’ (Gellner 1997: 92). For applied linguistics, then, we can explain the native speaker as the embodiment of the standard language, itself maintained and demonstrated by the synchronic interaction of institutions and available through education both to NNS and to NSs.