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201 14 ideology and the standardization of arabic YASIR SULEIMA N Cambridge University Language Standardization: The Play of Ideologies Considered from the perspective of language standardization, grammar making is a form of codification whose immediate aim, as opposed to its ulterior motive, is to provide a set of rules for a selected variety of the language. In language policy terms, grammar making is an aspect of corpus planning that goes hand in hand with status planning in the standardization of a language (Cooper 1989). Having selected a language variety as a base for cross-dialectal standardization through status-planning activities, corpus planning seeks to provide this standard in the making with a writing system—or an elaboration or modification of an existing writing system—rules for spelling, a grammar (or grammars), a lexicon (or lexica) and style manuals as norm-setting measures for further elaboration and implementation. Through these measures, corpus planning aims to fix the selected variety, mainly in its written form, by constraining variability—or, alternatively, enhancing uniformity—in linguistic behavior as much as possible, and by setting norms for correctness in writing and speech. With time, these norms become ossified or frozen, leading to a prescriptive attitude in assessing correctness in the standard. This broad characterization of language standardization masks a complex phenomenon . To begin with, standardization is a process that never ends (except for so-called dead languages), not least because of its fuzziness and owing to the fact that it is the subject of contestation by different interests in society. Furthermore, standard languages constantly evolve to meet the communicative needs of their users. However, grammar making as a form of monitoring and codification hardly ever follows suit at the same rate. It always lags behind, usually exceedingly so; hence the rise of prescriptivism as an attitude of locking the forms of the standard language in relation to established rules and usages that, for modernizers, seek to stifle or censure innovation. For the guardians of the language, prescriptivism is necessary to keep the standard from disintegration and fracture. Second, although status planning—the choice of a standard—logically precedes corpus planning, the two aspects of standardization cannot be neatly separated or chronologically ordered in practice. A standard language emerges through a mélange yasir Suleiman 202 of selection, codification, and circulation to become the prestigious form of the language . As a superposed variety, its acceptance by those for whom it is crafted is important for its consecration as standard, regardless of whether this acceptance is the result of rational choice, acquiescence, inertia, or coercion. Third, and this is the key point here, standardization tends to be mediated by an ideology in which elite interests play a determining role. In this context, ideology is understood as an “amalgam, of ideas, strategies, tactics, and practical symbols for promoting, perpetuating or changing a social and cultural order” (Friedrich 1989, 301). In fact, standardization itself is a form of ideology. As the main form of language planning, standardization is inextricably linked to the promotion and pursuit of nonlinguistic or extra-linguistic ends in which issues of high culture, political and social power, identity and conflict, moral/ethical values, purity, aesthetics, epistemology , and power play a significant mediating role. My aim in this chapter is to deal with the ideological—rather than the linguistic —content of standardization and its evolving contextual elaborations in grammar making in the Arabic linguistic tradition in the first four centuries of Islam. Not only has this period witnessed the production of the first grammars of the language and their promulgation in pedagogic form, but it is also characterized by sociopolitical fault zones with direct bearing on grammar making. In carrying out this task I am aware that most of the research on standardization is formulated against the ideologies of modernization, ethnicity and nationalism, group conflict, nation building, and state formation in the modern world. It is, therefore, important that the concerns raised by these ideologies are not read into the past uncritically. However, it is also important to recognize that some of the concerns of standardization in the modern period are not so different from those of standardization in the past. It is this fact which allows us to talk retrospectively about standardization in the premodern world to gain insights into the ideological concerns that inform it. The quest for uniformity, correctness, purity, and identity in standardization as an ideology or discursive project is, as I suggest below, at the heart of grammar making in the...

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