Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Contributors -- 1. Prescription and Tradition: Establishing Standards across Time and Space -- Part 1: General and Theoretical -- 2. Defining 'Standard': Towards a Cross-Cultural Definition of the Language Norm -- 3. Prescriptivism and Writing Systems -- 4. 'What is Correct Chinese?' Revisited -- 5. The Uselessness of the Useful: Language Standardisation and Variation in Multilingual Contexts -- 6. Prescriptivism and Sociolinguistic Competence in German as a Foreign Language -- Part 2: Prescription and Tradition -- 7. Prescriptivism in a Comparative Perspective: The Case of France and England -- 8. 'A Higher Standard of Correctness than is Quite Desirable': Linguistic Prescriptivism in Charles Dickens's Journals -- 9. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Competing Language Norms in the Southern Low Countries (1815-1830) -- 10. The Syntax of Others: 'Un-Icelandic' Verb Placement in 19thand Early 20th-Century Icelandic -- 11. School Grammars and Language Guides: Prescriptivism in the German Language Codex in the Early 20th Century -- Part 3: Usage Guides: An English Tradition -- 12. A Perspective on Prescriptivism: Language in Reviews of The New Fowler's Modern English Usage -- 13. Which Items Need to be Standardised? Variation in the Choice of Entries in Usage Guides -- 14. 'Garnering' Respect? The Emergence of Authority in the American Usage Tradition -- 15. Stalwarts, SNOOTS and Some Readers: How 'Traditional Rules' are Traditional -- Part 4: Redefining Boundaries: Current Issues and Challenges -- 16. 'Goodbye, Sweet England': Language, Nation and Normativity in Popular British News Media -- 17. Prescription and Tradition: From the French Dictionnaire de l'Académie to the Official French Language Enrichment Process (1996-2014) -- 18. Challenges in the Standardisation of Contemporary Russian -- 19. Language Regimentation as Soviet Inheritance: Joining Scholarship and State Ideology -- 20. Prescription and Language Management in Macedonia -- 21. The Standardisation Process of Frisian: A Word List as a Result -- 22. The Standardisation of Pronunciation: Basque Today, between Maintenance and Variation -- Epilogue: On Establishing the Standard Language - and Language Standards -- Index