The Ecological Impact of a Dictionary

The production of a dictionary of Jersey Norman French seems to have created a perception by speakers that they did not know the language. This perception appears to be the result of the ecological change which the dictionary produced by repositioning the language from an oral habitat to a written one. Such a move produces ideologies related to authority in language which alter the ways in which an individual's own language use can be perceived. These ecological changes stem from the advent of the possibility of prescriptivism, the production of a magnavocabulary, and the attachment of the dictionary to a past language ecology, rather than contemporary usage.