This thesis investigates language standardization from linguistic, sociolinguistic and critical applied linguistic perspectives. It arises from my involvement with a local ex-refugee Hmong community, who asked me a few years ago to assist in an ongoing standardization project; working first on orthography establishment, then moving on to dictionary work. This work has led me to consider what directs the phenomenon, the goals and the procedures of standardization. An intricate web of ideologies, intergroup relations, linguistic considerations and practical requirements motivate and shape the course it follows. Speakers and researchers, the minority community and the dominant culture all influence its processes and outcomes. For my primary Hmong consultancy group, a strong socio-politico-religious position leads the standardization agenda, manifested particularly in the choice of a unique script. Throughout the wider Hmong community, values including orthodoxy, progressivism and nationism interact with communicative, pedagogical, scientific and technological imperatives, as well as the broader context of recent relocation to a western environment. This complex of conditions informs the salient problems and directions discussed. My approach comprises (i) a descriptive linguistic and sociolinguistic assessment of how particular aspects of language are treated in standardisation, and (ii) a post-Foucauldian investigation of how the processes of standardization are given form as possible objects of thought, discussion or action. In order to explore these questions: / (i) I ground my case study in a descriptive and analytical presentation of the language and linguistics topics most salient to standardisation. Base linguistic issues include phonology and word formation. Key language planning issues are standard dialect, orthography, lexical elaboration, tools of standardisation and dissemination. Contentions and solutions are discussed for each issue which arises, as seen from various positions from both inside and outside the Hmong-speaking community. The focuses and projects of many different subgroups are incorporated, and the local dictionary project discussed in depth. / (ii) I excavate and construct the discourse formations—that is, the structures which predispose the particular ideas, principles and directions of standardization that emerge. I examine the strategies people employ in their movement within these discourse formations, and explore how the discourses are perpetually reworked and reconstituted in the process of their actualisation during the standardization processes. / The strong orientation of this thesis on the one hand to the work and ideas of the speech community, and on the other hand to exploring the underlying structures shaping language and linguistics work, calls attention to the some of structures implicit in the research itself. Specifically, this thesis foregrounds considerations of the changing roles of researchers and speakers, the legitimation of certain kinds of knowledge, and the differences in what can be understood of the object of research depending on the discursive position of the viewer. I develop working principles which pursue diversity of viewing positions, emphasise the knowledge and perspectives of speakers, and privilege the small and particular over the dominant and central. / The thesis as a whole contributes to: • furthering current understanding of linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects of the Hmonglanguage and its standardization / • expanding linguistic theory to incorporate social conditions and discursive bases as aninextricable part of the language ecology.