| The Ideal | Observable Practice | 1. | Languages are clearly bounded | Languages shade off into one another |
|---|---|---|
| 2. | Dialects are unstandardized and full of regional and social variation | Dialects can exhibit uniformity and may be quite `standardized' |
| 3. | Languages have `literature;' Dialects don't | Dialects may have strictly coded oral tradition, and even written epics, poetry, etc. |
| 4. | Languages are `older, better' and are best for education and logical thinking | Dialects may have ancient histories and capable of expressing clarity of thought |
| 5. | Languages are collections of mutually intelligible, genetically related local or social dialects | Dialects may closely resemble more than one `language' in a chain of mutual intelligiblity |
| 6. | Speech forms with different writing systems are different languages | Writing may have no effect on mutual oral intelligibility, but certainly can affect mutual legibility |
| 7. | Religion should have nothing to do with anyone's perception of what is a language | Religion has everything to do with many people's perception of language; e.g. Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croation |
| 8. | Languages have existed from time immemorial and represent something unchanging and fixed | Languages are social constructs and change through time |
| 9. | Language planners can make changes in both morphology and lexicon | Languages can be quite resistant to the tinkering of cultural critics and lg. planners |
| 10. | Standard languages emerge because they have certain admirable qualities that make them suited to be official and national vehicles | Standard languages emerge because they are the dialects of powerful rulers or important centers of power at crucial moments in history |