Standard Languages and Language Standards

Book excerpt: This volume brings together scholars from different disciplines, with a variety of perspectives, linguistic and literary, historical and social, to address issues of control, prescription, planning and perceptions of value, processes of establishing a standard and practices and ideologies of standardization, over the long history of the Greek language, from the age of Homer to the present day. With a wide range of topics, from contested educational initiatives to competing understandings of the Greek language, from the Hellenistic koine to cyber-Greek, the volume provides a series of informed overviews and snapshots of telling cases that both illuminate the history of Greek and explore the nature of language standardization itself. The volume will be important for students and scholars of the Greek language, past and present, and, beyond the Greek example, for sociolinguists, historians and social scientists with interests in the role of language in the construction of identities.