Autorentext

Ji í Nekvapil is a sociolinguist at Charles University, Prague. His research focuses on the issues of language interaction, language diversity in multinational companies, and the ethnomethodologically based analysis of media discourse. He recently co-edited The Place of Language Surveys and Censuses in Language Planning and Policy (special issue of Current Issues of Language Planning, issue 4, vol. 27, 2026).

Tamah Sherman is a researcher at the Czech Language Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences. Her work focuses on multiplex approaches to the sociolinguistic situation in the contemporary Czech Republic, with a specific emphasis on the management conducted by and toward immigrants. For over twenty years, she has worked as an editor of the journal Slovo a slovesnost.

Petar Vukovi is a professor at the Department of West Slavic Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. His research focuses on language standardization and historical sociolinguistics in Central Europe and the Slavic-speaking countries, with a particular focus on Czech and Croatian.

Klappentext

This collection examines language standardization as a dynamic, lived practice that is initiated, assessed, implemented or challenged through a range of interconnected social interactions occurring at both micro and macro levels.

The volume explores how standardization, commonly understood as organized activities of particular social groups to advance language development goals, can be discursively contested in everyday social life. The book interrogates the connections between standardization process reflected in the "simple management" of everyday speakers and "organized management" at the institutional level across different dimensions. Chapters are grouped accordingly around key thematic connection points: language, identity and social justice; education and globalization; technologies and new media; and language consulting and codification. Taken together, the collection provides unique insights into the gradual development of language standardization processes across societal levels, offering the view of standardization as lived practice.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in language policy and planning, sociolinguistics, language education and applied linguistics.

Inhalt

Part I: Theoretical and Conceptual Framework, 1. Introduction: Why lived standardization?, Petar Vukovi , Tamah Sherman and Ji í Nekvapil, 2. The language norm as a divisive tool: Grassroot effects of institutionalised standardisation, Dick Smakman, Part II: Language, Identity, and Social Justice, 3. How to address someone? Language management and the gender debate in German forms of address, Paul Rössler, 4. "A female name cannot be registered for a physical person of male sex, and vice versa." Language management and language ideologies in the self-help discourse of the transgender community in the Czech Republic, Helena özörencik, 5. Striking differences beneath superficial similarity - easy language in Germany (Leichte Sprache) and Japan (yasashii nihongo), Goro Christoph Kimura, Part III: Education, Globalization, and World Englishes, 6. Language Management Theory as a framework for localising CEFR written production descriptors in Malaysian higher education, Mohd Khairul Abu Sufi and Nor Liza Ali, 7. Language standardization and world Englishes: Insights from policy and textbook analysis from a language management perspective, M. Obaidul Hamid, Part IV: Technologies and New Media, 8. Managing a lack of standardization in the digital age: Problems relating to the input of 'non-standard' names on Japanese online digital forms, Lisa Fairbrother, 9. How to write about Jews in Czech: The new letter "middle " as an avoidance strategy, Ji í Nekvapil, Part V: Language Consulting and Codification, 10. Language consulting in Hungary: On the practices of the Hungarian Language Consulting Service, Ágnes Domonkosi and Zsófia Ludányi, 11. Requirements for stricter language standardization: A specific type of post-interaction management, Kamila Smejkalová and Tamah Sherman, 12. Reforming the unreformable: Russian and Czech orthographies in the 1960s, Petar Vukovi , Part VI: Pluricentric and Postcolonial Contexts, 13. The diatopic dimension of language standardization: Pluricentric or pluriareal languages as specific patterns of language management processes, Vít Dovalil, 14. Standardization, language and managing the racial order in colonial Canada, Sean Brookfield Meades, 15. Dissecting the challenges and opportunities of isiZulu standardisation in South Africa: A language management perspective, Nobuhle Ndimande-Hlongwa and Hloniphani Ndebele, Index