The question could be put: 'Is there anything inherent in a dialect which gives it a negative stigma or is it that the status of the majority of the speakers is transferred to the dialect?' — something that occurs in many regions in different countries.

Bloomfield, for example, noted that “local dialects are spoken by the peasants and the poorest people of the towns” (1933: 50) though he also thought that the lower middle class spoke 'sub-standard' speech.

Among common errors still persisting in the minds of educated people, one error which dies very hard is the theory that a dialect is an arbitrary distortion of the mother tongue, a wilful mispronunciation of the sounds, and disregard of the syntax of a standard language.

And in addition, many dialects of English make no morphological distinction between Adjectives and Adverbs, and thus use Adjectives in contexts where the standard language requires -ly Adverbs

Well, those children don't speak dialect, not in this school. Maybe in the public schools, but not here.

[…] on the second day, Miss Anderson gave the school a lecture on why it was wrong to speak dialect. She had ended by saying "Respectable people don't speak dialect."

Many even deny it and say something like this: "No, we don't speak a dialect around here.

Home computers in the 1980s had many incompatible dialects of BASIC.

A curious question, which has as yet attracted but little attention, is whether the notes of the same species of Bird are in all countries alike. From my own observation I am inclined to think that they are not, and that there exist "dialects," so to speak, of the song.

Dialect

Meaning

Noun

Origin

Related