Language Standard and French Literary Language According to Sociolinguistics

Abstract

The article is focusing on the problems of standards, the peculiarities of functioning of modern French language, such as situational variability which influences the choice of certain language unit according to a situation of the communicative act. This research is relevant since the essential value is given to the study of the language norm at all levels of language organization – grammatical, lexical, phonetic. Together with development of the speech, with emergence of new features in it, its norm is modified as well. In other words, the norm needs to be considered not in a statics, but in dynamics, in view of “dynamic aspect of norm”. In linguistics the term “norm” is used in two ways – broad sense and narrow. In a broad sense, the norm is a traditionally and spontaneously established methods of language that distinguish one language system from the others (in this sense, the norm is close to the concept of “usage”, i.e. generally accepted, well-established ways of using this language). In the narrow sense, the norm is the result of purposeful codification of a language. Such understanding of norm is closely connected with a concept of the literary language which otherwise could be called normalized or codified language.