The chapter explores the ECHR approach to the minimum standards of the environmental minimum. These standards apply once a specific risk has been established and are derived either from domestic and international legal norms, or in lieu of these, established and emerging scientific evidence. Notably, unclear or contradictory scientific evidence grants states a wide margin of appreciation in formulating a regulatory response. Should a violation of minimum standards be established, individuals have a claim based on the right invoked at the specific risk stage. The question for the ECHR case law is whether it requires the enforcement of legal norms, and mandates subsidiary recourse to established and emerging scientific evidence in their absence. The ECHR generally meets these requirements: a clear majority of cases where domestic environmental regulations were ignored by authorities also resulted in a violation of the ECHR. However, the chapter acknowledges some enduring concerns, notably the failure of the Court to invariabley find violations where states fail to consistently enforce domestic law and its deferential approach in some cases where a state had no legal norms to enforce.

If language standardization is understood as a historical process that strengthens a standard norm at the expense of variation, prefixing de- to standardization gives us a notion concerning change in the opposite direction: a progressive weakening of the norm in favour of variation. This is what the chapter discusses: are we experiencing, under the contemporary conditions of Late Modernity, a situation whereby the continued strengthening of the standard norm is being replaced by an incipient weakening? It is argued that the discussion needs to focus on the ideological aspect of the issue. Norway is discussed as an exemplary case of norm weakening, based on evidence that the multiplicity of dialects is more present and accepted in public domains than ever before, as the standard language ideology (tSLI; he belief in a ‘best’ language) has been abandoned: destandardization. In contrast, Denmark is discussed as an exemplary case of continued norm strengthening based on evidence that dialectal variation disappears as SLI changes, but grows stronger than ever before. This latter situation is termed demotization. Other terms are also discussed, including restandardization and vernacularization, which have been proposed in reported work from other countries (including Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, the UK, the USA, New Zealand and Sri Lanka).