Overview

How you speak tells people who you are. Your region, your class, your gender, your age. Language is a social badge.

Core Idea

Prestige:

  • Overt Prestige: The “Standard” dialect (e.g., BBC English). Used to show education/status.
  • Covert Prestige: The local dialect (e.g., Cockney, AAVE). Used to show street cred and solidarity with your group.

Formal Definition (if applicable)

Code-Switching: Moving between two languages or dialects in a single conversation. It’s not “bad grammar”; it’s a complex social skill.

Intuition

  • Labov’s Department Store Study: He asked staff in Saks (High class), Macy’s (Middle), and Klein’s (Low) “Where are the shoes?” (Fourth Floor). He found that the higher the class, the more they pronounced the “r” in “Fourth.”

Examples

  • AAVE (African American Vernacular English): A rule-governed dialect, not “broken English.” (e.g., The Habitual Be: “He be working” means he works usually, not just right now).
  • Gender: Do women hedge more? (“I think…”, “Sort of…”).

Common Misconceptions

  • “Dialects are corruptions of the pure language.” (All languages are dialects. The “standard” is just the dialect of the people with the army and the navy).
  • Pidgin: A simplified mix of languages for trade.
  • Creole: When a Pidgin becomes the native language of the next generation (e.g., Haitian Creole).
  • Diglossia: Using a “High” language for school/church and a “Low” language for home (e.g., Arabic).

Applications

  • Education: Respecting home dialects while teaching the standard.
  • Policy: Official language laws.

Criticism / Limitations

Can reinforce stereotypes if not careful.

Further Reading

  • Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns
  • Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society