Shifts in the Attitude to the Standard Variations of English

The theme of my thesis is the changing attitudes towards language norm from the era of book-printing to nowadays. In the introduction I suppose that the appearance of sociolinguistics at the middle of the 20th century changed these attitudes at a considerable degree. In the first half of the thesis I review the history of standardization, concentrating on the different conceptions of the norm. After this part I write about two important fields of sociolinguistic researches which influenced the way of thinking of the norm: language and sex, and the usage of the different social layers. As a part of the latter topic, I also concern with the language of the Internet.