Language norms

The concept of a language norm is the main feature of a literary language, since the culture of human speech is manifested, first of all, in its correctness. It covers not only one side of the language, but it concerns everyone, both for written speech and oral.

Language norms are the rules on the basis of which the use of certain means of language occurs at a certain stage of its development. It is also a common, exemplary use of word combinations, sentences and words in speech.

Distinguish the following language norms of the Russian language :

-word-formation (norms of the formation of new words);

- Orphoepic (or pronunciation norms);

- Morphological;

- orthographic;

-leksicheskie;

-syntactic;

-punctual;

-intational.

Some of them are characteristic for two kinds of speech, and some are only for oral or only for written.

Language norms are a historically formed phenomenon. Some of them appeared long ago and remained unchanged until now, while others - have disappeared. Some even come into conflict. For example, the German word "entrant" comes from the Mid-Latin word meaning "one that is going to go away," and these days they are called the one who, on the contrary, is going to come to study. That is, over time, the rate of use of this word has changed.

Orpheopic language norms are also not stable. For example, the borrowed word "bankrupt" was written before the 18th century as "bankrupt." Until the end of the 19th century, both forms were used, and then the new form of its use became the norm.

Undergone changes and pronunciation of the combination of -wh-. So the explanatory dictionaries of 1935-1940-ies represent different norms than those that exist now. For example, in the words "toy, snack barrel", the combination -ch- was pronounced as -shn-, which is now completely unacceptable. Some words have preserved a two-fold variant: bakery, decent.

Morphological language norms also change. This is well traced in the example of the endings of the nouns of the masculine gender in the plural and nominative. The fact is that some have the ending -y, and the other ending -a. This is due to the existence before the 13th century in Old Russian language of the form of the dual number, which was used when it was necessary to point out two objects. Thus, three variants of endings were obtained: zero for nouns in the singular, ending -a for indicating two subjects and ending-s for indicating the number of objects exceeding two. At first the ending -a was preserved in those words that denoted paired objects: the eye, the side, and so on. Gradually, it almost supplanted the ending-u and other words.

But for animate nouns in the plural the predominantly preserved ending -y: accountants, drivers, engineers, lecturers, inspectors and inspectors, but professors.

Sometimes it is also necessary to take into account the lexical meaning of the word. For example, the word "teacher" with the meaning "teacher" has in the nominative plural ending - I, and with the meaning "head of teaching" - ending -i; The word "sheet" (paper) has the ending -y, and the "leaf" (tree) is the ending -y.

Multivariance of norms testifies to the incredible wealth of the Russian language. But at the same time, this creates certain difficulties, since it becomes necessary to choose from this number the correct option. This can be done correctly only if the characteristic of each variant is known, its syntactic coloring. As a result of a detailed study of the use in speech (oral and written) of various variants, linguists have created special dictionaries and explanatory dictionaries, in which the language norms characteristic of the modern literary language are fixed.