The concept of a language norm is the main feature of a literary language, since the culture of human speech is manifested primarily in its correctness. It covers not one side of the language, but applies to absolutely everyone, necessarily both for written speech and for oral.
Language norms - these are the rules on the basis of which the use of certain means of the language occurs at a certain stage of its development. It is also a common, exemplary use of phrases, sentences and words in speech.
The following language norms of the Russian language are distinguished:
- word-building (norms for the formation of new words);
- orthoepic (or pronunciation norms);
- morphological;
Orthographic
lexical;
syntactic;
-punctual;
-intonation.
Some of them are characteristic of two types of speech, and some are only for oral or only for written.
Language norms are a historically formed phenomenon. Some of them appeared a long time ago and have remained unchanged until now, while others have disappeared. Some even conflict. For example, the German word "entrant" comes from the middle Latin word with the meaning "the one who is going to leave," and today they call him who, on the contrary, is going to study. That is, over time, the rate of use of this word has changed.
Orthoepic 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 won and became the norm.
Has undergone changes and pronunciations of the combination ––––. So the explanatory dictionaries of the 1935-1940s represent different norms than those that exist today. For example, in the words “toy, diner” the combination “chn” was pronounced “–shn”, which is now completely unacceptable. Some words have preserved a twofold option: a bakery, decent.
Morphological language norms are also changing. This is well traced on the example of the endings of masculine nouns in the plural and nominative case. The fact is that some have an ending, and others have an ending. This is due to the existence of the dual number form in the Old Russian language, which was used when it was necessary to point out two objects. Thus, three variants of endings turned out: zero for singular nouns, –a ending to indicate two objects and –– ending to indicate the number of objects exceeding two. At first, the ending -a was preserved in those words that denoted paired objects: eye, side, etc. Gradually, it almost replaced the ending of other words.
But the animated nouns in the plural mostly preserved the ending -s: accountants, drivers, engineers, lecturers, inspectors and inspectors, but professors.
Sometimes you also need to consider the lexical meaning of the word. For example, the word "teacher" with the meaning "teacher" has an ending in the nominative plural - I, and with the meaning "head of doctrine" - the ending –and; the word “sheet” (of paper) has an ending -s, and the “sheet” (of wood) has an ending -i.
The multivariance of norms testifies to the incredible richness of the Russian language. But at the same time, this creates certain difficulties, since it becomes necessary to choose the right option from this number. Correctly, this can be done only if the characteristics of each variant, its syntactic coloring, are known. As a result of a detailed study of the use of different variants in speech (oral and written), linguistic scientists have created special dictionaries and explanatory dictionaries in which linguistic norms that are characteristic of the modern literary language are fixed.