YURI ROZHDESTVENSKY ON PATTERNS OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION, LANGUAGE STANDARDIZATION, AND MEDIA ECOLOGY.

SOCIAL evolution; STANDARD language; MASS media industry; SOCIAL norms; INFORMATION & communication technologies

The article shows how the field of media ecology can enrich the field of sociolinguistics and vice versa. The focus is on the interconnections between the emergence of new media and historical types of language standardization. A prevailing view of language standardization critiques it as prescriptivism, the imposition of the social elite's linguistic norms on the populace. Yuri Rozhdestvensky, the Russian linguist who studied the influence of communication technologies on language, interprets standardization differently: as an attempt to resolve the crisis caused by the disruption of traditional modes of communication. In his view, language normalization is seen as an inevitable part of cultural history and an important sociocultural phenomenon. The author explains some of Rozhdestvensky's terms, and elaborates on Rozhdestvensky's suggestion to distinguish the history of language standardization as a separate field of inquiry at the intersection of media ecology and linguistic historiography. The paper presents some linguistics apparatus which media ecologists can use effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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