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"Standard English: what it isn’t" : a summary

মন মাঝি's picture
Submitted by monmajhi [Guest] on Sun, 19/02/2012 - 12:49pm
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PREFACE:
I recently stumbled upon the following summary of an article titled "Standard English: what it isn’t", by the eminent sociolinguist Peter Trudgill. I wrote this a long time ago as a training 'reading assignment'. Majority of it is cut/paste business I think (I haven't closely compared it with the original this time). But, since the recent Bangladesh High Court suo moto ruling against the use of "distorted Bangla" and the resultant debate (a very old one though) on 'Standard Bangla", it occurred to me that this article by Mr Trudgill, a well known authority on dialects , is although about English and not about Bangla or at all about the kind of debate we are having at this moment due to the High Court ruling - may still be able to shed a bit of light on some issues relevant to us - albeit very indirectly.

So, I've decided to post my summary here (without the last 2 paragraphs of it) in the spirit of sharing and hoping that it is suitable for Sachalayatan and does not break any of its posting guideline and most importantly - readers find it illuminating, interesting and pertinent in some way, despite the poor quality of my summarization. Interested readers can still read the full original article by Trudgill here.