The Standard

As I came upon a small article the other day entitled Five Events that Shaped the History of English (which can be read here), I noticed standardization among the five events. The article labels the Anglo-Saxton Settlement, the Scandinavian settlements, colonization/globalization, the Norman Conquest (1066 and after), and standardization as the five most influential events in the course of the English Language. The start of my research on standardization began here.

In England, around 1476, when books began to be printed, the newly invented spelling system was extremely tampered with. This was caused by the fact that nearly all the early London printers were from a foreign country and, therefore, destined to make many spelling errors. In addition, printers were usually paid by the line so that by inserting additional letters to a word, they could earn more money. They would, also, regularly added extra letters to the last word of a line to make the whole text look neater. Eventually many of these spelling errors, and tricks became accepted. For example, the word “had” was sometimes spelled as “hadd” or “hadde”.
Many inflectional endings were eventually eliminated, including final unstressed e's. Although they continued in the spelling system, they were given another purpose. The Great Vowel Shift is included in this repurpose, because the e’s are used as a tool to signal the value of the long vowels, such as in mate, name, and while. Other sounds were reduced then eliminated.

During the 1440s, which was after the invention of the printing press, English spelling began to become fixed. Printing houses gradually led to this taking place and even the creating of a “house style”. House styles were created when a master printer of a printing house chose the spellings that he liked the most.

Printers outside of the direct control of church and government led to the growth of a professional class of role printers in setting standards of writing and spelling. Printers had a strong interest in normalization, reducing variation and therefore making the printing process easier. As the profession of publishing has evolved from the printing profession, publishers have been essential to setting written standards.