[Linganth] Military Standard English?

[Edwin Everhart]

This really deserves a good library search and probably a dissertation but
I couldn’t resist sending a quick comment from on board a train. I have
recent anecdotal confirmation from a student, and from one of my cousins,
that the US military *currently* has a language standardization policy. I
don’t know how robust it is. My interlocutors said that they sometimes
struggled to understand other members of their units, and that
miscommunications were resolved informally.

On the margins of my research on contemporary language standardization in
Japan I have heard stories about a change in military language policy
there, moving from regionally-based units to units that were intentionally
made up of soldiers from all across the archipelago. Apparently this policy
was instituted specifically to facilitate national (linguistic) unity.

But I’m afraid I don’t have any sources at my fingertips to back this up,
except for the Amtrak magazine. It looks like they’ve cut way back on their
research budget for historiography of 20th century Japan...

Edwin K. Everhart

On Mon, Sep 9, 2019 at 12:00 Galey Modan <gmodan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Has anyone ever heard of US Military Standard English? I'm doing a section
> on language standardization in a class; a student of mine was talking to
> her grandfather about it, and he mentioned that when he was in the
> military, the military took an active approach to standardizing both accent
> and grammar so that there would be no risk of miscommunication in
> life-or-death situations. I guess this would have been in the 60s or 70s?
> I'd appreciate any leads anyone might have about this, as I've never heard
> of this before.
>
> thanks a lot,
>
> Galey Modan
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-- 
Edwin K. Everhart, PhD
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