230 CHAPTER 7
Development of a Prestige Dialect
All countries have prestige dialects, and, in most cases, sheer historical acci-
dent led to the dominance of one variety of a language rather than another.
Haugen (1966) suggested that all standard dialects undergo similar processes
that solidify their position in a society. First, a society will select, usually on the
basis of users’ socioeconomic success, a particular variety of the language to be
the standard. At some point, the chosen variety will be codified by teachers and
scholars who write grammar books and dictionaries for it. The effect is to stabi-
lize the dialect by reaching some sort of agreement regarding what is correct
and what is not. The dialect then must be functionally elaborated so that it can
be used in government, law, education, technology, and in all forms of writing.
Finally, the dialect has to be accepted by all segments of the society as the stan-
dard, particularly by those who speak some other variety (Hall, 1972;
Macaulay, 1973; Trudgill, 2001).
Nonstandard Dialects
Although many people think of nonstandard dialects exclusively in terms of
Black English and Chicano English, dialects cannot be viewed simply in terms
of ethnicity. Many African Americans speak BEV, but not all do. Not surpris-
ingly, the determining factor nearly always is SES, not ethnicity. Thus, we find
nonstandard dialects in all communities—white, Asian, Hispanic, and
black—that have low incomes.
For most of America’s history, the difficulties of travel in such a large coun-
try made geography the most important factor in language variation. Regional
dialects still abound, but Wolfram et al. (1998) reported a leveling of regional
differences. Labov (1996), however, noted that:
Sociolinguistic research on linguistic change in progress has found rapid
development of sound changes in most urbanized areas of North Amer-
ica, leading to increased dialect diversity. It appears that the dialects of
New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Saint Louis, Dallas, and Los
Angeles are now more different from each other than they were 50 or 100
years ago. (p. 1)The data may not be in conflict. It is possible that leveling is occurring across
regions, moving Western and Southern dialects, for example, closer, while the
opposite is true in the nation’s major urban centers. At this point, the findings
are unclear and require further research.
Nevertheless, we can speculate about the factors that might be influencing
dialect change. Leveling may well be the result of increased American mobil-