On the Epistemological Status of Comparative Standardology and Standardisation

This work stems from our desire to contribute to the epistemological consolidation of comparative standardology (CS) as an academic subdiscipline. It is based on the premise that CS falls into the applied linguistics (AL) domain, so it is right to discuss for CS what Kaplan (2002) and Grabe (2002) discussed for AL in general. Our research question is whether CS is an epistemologically firmly established academic subdiscipline. Our hypothesis is that it is, with CS being the theoretical field of standardisation, which in turn is the practice of CS. Our objective is to confirm this hypothesis. To do that, we follow the descriptive model adopted by Gelpí & Costa-Carreras (2007), which they used to describe the epistemological status of AL in general and of the disciplines related to it. We exemplify our reflections with the analysis of five papers. The expected result is a description of the relatively firmly established epistemological status of CS.