The Linguistic Challenge for Standards

Abstract

Standards serve a valuable function that enable efficiencies, technological advancement, and commerce. To date, there is little examination of the problems with standards, their implementations, and methodologies that could be introduced to improve utility and utilization. This is contrasted against the large inventory of standards that exist, and proliferation of standards. More available literature exists on standards wars that focus on attempts at market dominance, persistence of ‘legacy’ standards in light of newer and ‘better’ solutions, cases for and against multiple standards, and even legal cases regarding anti-competitive behavior leveraging dominance in particular standards. This, however, focuses more on the politics as opposed to presenting a more fundamental examination of the cause for the existing friction. Through applied linguistics, it becomes more apparent that differences in language, using Communities of Practice as a guide, can provide a dimension to standards development and implementation. Friction in standards arises when standards are viewed as broad and universally applicable versus being the expression of a specific Community of Practice, and therefore should be specifically and formally scoped using linguistic methods.