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alndnasd;lfgknas;dlknfg

Linguistic Chauvinism and Intolerance

So if impressions like those of the speakers in the box above have no basis in fact, where do they come from? There are three possibilities. First, these people may have been told by an authority, for example, an English teacher, that certain usages are just plain wrong. Clearly, the reasoning would go, anyone who knows this should not be using those forms. We'll return to this issue in the next section. The fact is that what is "wrong" is all relative. The girls quoted in the conversation in the box would almost certainly find it wrong to say it doesn't mean anything when speaking to each other. If they wrote it don't mean nothin' in a school essay, on the other hand, that would be another matter (though it would still not be reason to call them lazy; it would just be evidence that they had not learned the rules of the variety of English that is appropriate in school). Second, these people may have a stereotype concerning the group in question, and they may be transferring that stereotype to the speech of that group. Third, what they hear differs from the English they speak, and people may be quite intolerant when it comes to speech. Especially if they belong (or believe they belong) to a political, economic, or intellectual elite, their view may be something like the following: "the way I speak the language is the right way; any other way is wrong".

Whatever the reason for the impressions of A and B in the box, a linguist would respond to them by saying that the two girls were simply speaking a different dialect of English, a dialect with its own grammar differing from the grammar of the dialect of A and B.

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