Standard American English is not the same as varieties of English that have emerged from the complex system of the language. It is an institutional construct, to the extent that schools convey the idea of a standard and attempt to teach prescriptions about the language. Usage manuals do not agree about what issues to cover. Some kinds of standardization of language, like standard spelling, are useful for the purposes of electronic communication, and standardization may make it easier to communicate across time and distance. What is more important is the idea of standards, and how that idea plays a role in social relations.

The new science of complex systems explains why Zelinsky’s cube is a good model of culture. It works well with economic markets–and also language in use. We can see the evidence that a complex system has operated in American English by looking at evidence from the Linguistic Atlas Project. Linguistic variants all show the same patterns of distribution, both overall in a population and in subset populations. These frequency profiles provide a challenge to traditional ways of thinking about language with grammars and dictionaries.