Codification is commonly thought of as the point at which a language acquires fixed forms, recorded in dictionaries, grammars, spelling rules and official documents. The forms it fixes, however, continue to depend on usage, on the communicative needs of speakers and on whoever has the authority to choose between competing variants. The article examines this tension by comparing Uzbek and English, two languages whose routes to a standard could hardly be more different. Uzbek has acquired an explicit legal and administrative framework for codification, most visibly in matters of script, spelling, terminology and the public use of the state language. English has never had an academy, in Britain or in the United States; its norms were fixed piecemeal by grammarians, lexicographers, schools, publishers and editors and, more recently, by corpus-based description. Drawing on language-planning theory, recent research on standardization, studies of both languages and Uzbek legislative texts, the article separates codification from standardization in the wider sense and asks what makes a codificatory decision linguistically justified. Neither the force of law nor frequency of use proves sufficient in either language. Durable norms emerge where several conditions are met at once: compatibility with the language system, attestation, functional adequacy, semantic precision, acceptance by users, continuity with earlier practice, ease of learning, digital interoperability and openness to revision. These conditions are grouped into a four-layer model of legitimacy (structural, empirical, functional-social and implementation legitimacy). Codification, on this account, regulates variation and does not abolish it. The two languages turn out to require broadly the same kinds of evidence, although they weight them differently.
Codification of Language Norms and Its Linguistic Criteria: A Comparative Study of Uzbek And English
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