The Construct of “Standard English”

This paper deals with the notion of Standard English as a sociolinguistic subject of interest, a field of study that has been elaborated in great detail starting from the latter half of the previous century leading into current day, one in which many linguistic perspectives and approaches have changed as a result of changes in the overall dominant ideology in its immediate social context. The aim is to provide a brief overview of some of the main issues that concern standardization, the misconceptions pertaining to language ‘standards’, the historical background that disambiguates the conditions that brought upon the standard ideology and the frameworks built to comprehensively illustrate the process that leads to standardization.