Ideology and the Standardization of Arabic

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.