7th International Language Management Symposium: Standardization as Language Management

Standardization as a process based on intervening in variation is usually aimed at efficient communication on a larger scale. It not only covers the emergence of standard varieties of languages, but also language cultivation, the elaboration of genres and terminologies, and language teaching as well as the development of norms and standards for industry, commerce and intercultural contact. How far should standardization go? Standards help to measure and compare quality. Achieving standards in various areas of human activities, extending far beyond language use, has been a product of the modern era. Standardization is inextricably linked with social modernization, i.e. with social and cultural development through industrialization, urbanization, and digitalization as well as political, economic and cultural integration and unification. This era is followed by the pluralization of the existing standards in connection with the post-modernist bolstering of regional and minority identities (Neustupný 2006). Standardization as a major goal of language development is usually conceived as politically authorized or as the organized activity of particular interest groups, but its success is ultimately measured by the implementation of proposed standards within the wider speech community; however, such standards may be contested and resisted in everyday interactions. In addition, some standards emerge in a bottomup manner, stemming, for example, from evolving community norms. For these reasons, research on standardization is well-suited for the language management approach (Fairbrother et al. 2018, Kimura & Fairbrother 2020). The symposium aims to explore all basic aspects of standardization processes from the perspective of language management theory as well as other relevant theories. References Fairbrother, L., J. Nekvapil & M. Sloboda (Eds) (2018). The Language Management Approach: A Focus on Research Methodology. Berlin: Peter Lang. Kimura, G. C. & L. Fairbrother (Eds) (2020). A Language Management Approach to Language Problems: Integrating Macro and Micro Dimensions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Neustupný, J. V. (2006). Sociolinguistic aspects of social modernization. In U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. J. Mattheier & P. Trudgill (Eds), Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society / Soziolinguistik: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Wissenschaft von Sprache und Gesellschaft. Volume 3 / 3. Teilband (pp. 2209–2224). Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter.