As Tony Bex points out: "Since the seventeenth century the concept of Standard English has referred to a 'common core of language', an ideal or value to be met, the 'true' meanings behind words, the language of the literati, and those items of vocabulary listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. More often than not, however, linguists and educationalists attempt to unite all these senses, giving rise to paradoxical and confusing theses." (Bex & Watts 1999, 86) We will take as a starting point Trudgill's definition of what Standard English is not:

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is mostly known for her very short stories, also known as flash fiction, sudden fiction, miniatures, or, as Ricks in his Introduction to her Collected Stories prefers to call them "devoirs" (Ricks 2013, xx). Although her works have appeared both in collections of short stories and in poetry anthologies, Davis considers herself a short story writer, and adamantly refutes the classification of her writing as poetry. She explains: Leaving aside whether or not some of my stories may be poetry, the problem of how to write an actual poem with line breaks still seems very interesting and mysterious. The truth is, I don't know how to do it. (McCaffery 1996, 76) Davis is proficient in 7 languages and is an acclaimed translator of Blanchot, Hocquard, and Leiris, for which she was made Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1999. Her translations of Proust's Swann's Way (2001) and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (2005), promoted her to the ranks of Officer in 2015. Davis was awarded the Man Booker International prize for the ensemble of her work in 2013. One of her current projects is to translate into English one literary work from each of the languages her works have been translated into. She does this without any formal lessons in the languages and without the help of a dictionary.

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