People engage in discussions on which linguistic items are ‘correct’
and ‘incorrect’, ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ on a daily basis.
They do so in private conversations, but also publicly by way of
telephone calls to radio stations, letters to newspapers and, since
the dawn of the participatory internet, on social media platforms,
such as blogs, microblogs (i.e. Twitter), forums and Facebook.
Conspicuously, however, in linguists’ theoretical models of language
standardisation, speakers have traditionally been marginalised as
passive followers of the norms established by language authorities.
The types of discussions mentioned are viewed as having no impact on
actual usage or on what it is that constitutes the standard variety,
while standard language norms are, according to such accounts,
enforced by language experts, codifiers and ‘model speakers [such as
journalists and newsreaders] and authors’ (Ammon, 2015: 65).