Language in Society

Exercise 1.1
Link 1.2: 
Visit http://americanenglishwiley.com/ to hear a clip of speakers 
pronouncing words with the 
thought
vowel (i.e. 
bought
and 
talk
) in different ways.
Based on each speaker’s pronunciation of the 
thought
vowel, where do you think 
each speaker is from? Which speaker’s pronunciation is closest to your own pro-
nunciation of the 
thought
vowel?

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4
Dialects, Standards, and Vernaculars
may be recognized as a dialect even by the speakers themselves. If someone keeps telling 
you that you speak a dialect, after a while you start to realize that you do. Thus, native 
New Yorkers often know that they speak a dialect, because their dialect has become a 
topic of widespread public comment in American society. Similarly, speakers of an 
Appalachian dialect, or “Mountain Talk,” might recognize that they speak a dialect 
because of the caricatures and comments that so often appear in the media. On the other 
hand, the same perception does not hold true of middle‐class residents of Ohio or 
Oregon whose speech does not receive popular attention. For a variety of historical and 
social reasons, some dialects have become much more marked than others in American 
society, and speakers of those varieties may therefore accept the dialect label assigned to 
their speech.
In the most extreme case (“[They] don’t really speak English; they speak a dialect”), 
dialect is used to refer to a kind of deficient or “corrupted” English. In this case, dialect 
is perceived as an imperfect attempt to speak “correct” or “proper” English. If, for 
example, members of a socially disfavored group use phrases like 
three mile
instead of 
three miles
, or 
Her ears be itching
instead of 
Her ears always itch
, it is assumed that they 
have attempted to produce the standard English form but simply failed. The result is 
incorrectly perceived as a “deviant” or “deficient” form of English. However, based 
upon the careful examination of the structures of varieties considered to be 
nonstand
-
ard
, linguists have demonstrated that these dialects are 
not
deviant forms of language, but 
simply different systems, with distinct subsets of language patterns. When we talk about 
language patterning, we are referring to the fact that language features are distributed in 
systematic and orderly ways rather than used randomly. That is, for any given language 
feature, there are systematic 
linguistic
rules
that govern its usage. The appendix of the 
book describes many of the patterns or “rules” that apply to the use of different dialect 
forms. Many linguistic rules are not categorical but apply only in specific cases, for exam-
ple, to sounds in certain word positions, or to words in certain grammatical structures. 
Forms that have regular patterns of variability are called 
linguistic
variables
; each dif-
ferent realization of a given variable feature is called a 
variant
. In Exercise 1.2 you will 
uncover the variable patterning of a variable feature called 
a
‐ prefixing. This feature has 
two variants, one that occurs with the 
a
‐ prefix, in forms such as 
a‐huntin’ and a‐fishin’
, 
and one that occurs without the prefix: 
huntin’ and fishin’
.