Codification of Linguistic Standards in the Context of Social and Cultural Changes

The paper deals with the Russian linguistic standards and the problem of their codification in the context of social and cultural changes taking into account various types of linguistic standards (including orthography and speech etiquette). The need for the codification of linguistic standards arises if there is variation in common usage. As far as the triple usage–norm–codification is concerned, one can immediately observe the first and the last members of the triple (codification being more “conservative” than the usage). The norm should be reconstructed and codified on the basis of observation of the usage and correlation of the observations with the data of dictionaries and reference guides as well as with the explicit judgments of native speakers. It pays special attention to the discrepancies between the usage and the existing codification, between different dictionaries and reference guides, between different dictionaries and reference guides on the one hand and the judgments of “experts” on the other.