"Quite remarkably, human languages typically meet countervailing demands for both change and mutual intelligibility. They can be adapted for use in new circumstances while retaining common ground among speakers. In this context, language standardization can be understood as a process that countervails change through codification and prescription, though not always in the interest of mutual intelligibility. The notion of a standard language is that from among many different ways of speaking a language (e.g., different dialects), there is one unique and correct way that can and should be shared by all members of the collective language "nation". For example, among different varieties of U.S. English (e.g., African-American Vernacular English or Appalachian English), only Mainstream U.S. English is the so-called standard. Similarly, among all natively spoken, international varieties of English (e.g., Singaporean or Indian English), only speakers from the UK and the US are considered standard-bearers. This last example, however, points to an often-overlooked feature of language standardization: it is driven more by ideological myth than linguistic necessity."
from: Cargile, A. C. (in press). Language attitudes. In Y. Y. Kim (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
I have an experience with the standardization of lexical resources according to the LMF (Lexical Markup Framework) ISO 24613 standard. The main goal is to unify the syntactic notations but the meanings remain free.
Standardization of the language arises from the political desire in a community to give a specific language a more important function and consequently higher status (status planning). This occurs, among other things, in former colonies in the post-colonial phase (as is happening with us in the Caribbean). The linguists then build and expand the language (corpus planning). Then the language experts work at the different language levels (from small to larger language components and levels) phoneme / grapheme (sound / letter), morpheme (word part), lexeme (word), syntagma (sentence), text linguistics/discourse (text) and pragmatics (language use). When the language is sufficiently developed and standardized, it is distributed (acquisition or distribution planning) to the inhabitants and other users. This is done through school and extracurricular implementation programs and the media. Standardization of language and language planning is usually seen as a part of sociolinguistics (sometimes linguistics) or also of nation building.