Defining the Standard Language and Its Corpus

The fourth chapter constitutes the first of two chapters dealing with the primary material of the study. It includes three subsections, each of which is devoted to a particular aspect of ‘standard language ideology’ evidenced in both the Hebrew and Arabic grammarians of the ʿAbbasid period. Moreover, each of these subsections is somehow concerned with the definition of the standard language and/or its corpus. These aspects are as follows: language as a cultural possession (see §1.0), proper language determined by an ancient corpus (see §2.0), and the ‘fieldwork’ topos (see §3.0).