Prestige (sociolinguistics)

In sociolinguistics, prestige is the level of regard normally accorded a specific

language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or
dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally
considered by a society to be the most "correct" or otherwise superior. In many
cases, they are the standard form of the language, though there are exceptions,
particularly in situations of covert prestige (where a non-standard dialect is highly
valued). In addition to dialects and languages, prestige is also applied to smaller
linguistic features, such as the pronunciation or usage of words or grammatical
constructs, which may not be pronounced enough to constitute a separate dialect.[1]
The concept of prestige provides one explanation for the phenomenon of variation in
form, among speakers of a language or languages.[2]

Sociolinguistic prestige is especially visible in situations where two or more distinct

languages are in use, and in diverse, socially stratified urban areas, in which there
are likely to be speakers of different languages and/or dialects interacting frequently.

The prevailing view among contemporary linguists is that regardless of perceptions

that a dialect or language is "better" or "worse" than its counterparts, when dialects
and languages are assessed "on purely linguistic grounds, all languages—and all
dialects—have equal merit".[3][4][5]

Additionally, which varieties, registers or features will be considered more

prestigious depends on audience and context.[6][7] There are thus the concepts of
overt and covert prestige. Overt prestige is related to standard and "formal"
language features, and expresses power and status; covert prestige is related more
to vernacular and often patois, and expresses solidarity, community and group
identity more than authority.[8]

Contents
Standard varieties and covert prestige
Causes
Language attitudes
Social class
Gender and covert prestige
Language contact
Language structure
See also
Notes
References
External links
Standard varieties and covert prestige
Prestige varieties are those that are regarded mostly highly within a society. As such,
the standard language, the form promoted by authorities and considered "correct" or
otherwise superior, is often the prestige variety. However, there are many exceptions
to this rule, such as Arabic, in which Egyptian Arabic is widely used in mass media
aimed at international audiences, while Literary Arabic (also known as Standard
Arabic) is a more prestigious form.[9][10][11] Prestige varieties do not exhibit features,
grammatically speaking, which prove them superior in terms of logic, efficacy or
aesthetics.[12] They are the language varieties of the prestigious social classes.[8]
Therefore, the prestige variety of a given language community or nation-state has
symbolic significance and may act as an instrument of political power.

The notion of a "standard" language in a speech community is related to the prestige

of the languages spoken in the community. In general, "greater prestige tends to be
attached to the notion of the standard, since it can function in higher domains, and
has a written form."[13] While there are some counterexamples, such as Arabic,
"prestigious and standard varieties [tend to] coincide to the extent that the two
terms can be used interchangeably."[9]

In countries like the United States, where citizens speak many different languages
and come from a variety of national and ethnic groups, there is a "folk linguistic"
belief that the most prestigious dialect is the single standard dialect of English that
all people should speak.[14] Linguist Rosina Lippi-Green believes that this belief in a
standard language justifies and rationalizes the preservation of the social order,
since it equates "nonstandard" or "substandard" language with "nonstandard or
substandard human beings."[3] Linguists believe that no language, or variety of
language, is inherently better than any other language, for every language serves its
purpose of allowing its users to communicate.[15]

The terms and conditions of prestige assigned to a language variety are subject to
change depending on speaker, situation and context. A dialect or variety which is
considered prestigious in one context, will not carry the same status in another.[6]
The relative status of language varies according to audience, situation and other
contextual elements is highly local. Covert prestige refers to relatively high value
placed on a non-standard form of language.[7]

Causes
Different languages and dialects are accorded prestige based upon factors, including
"rich literary heritage, high degree of language modernization, considerable
international standing, or the prestige of its speakers".[16] These, and other
attributes and factors contribute to how the language is viewed as being of high
prestige,[17] leaving a language or dialect with few or none of these attributes to be
considered to be of low prestige.

"Language is intertwined with culture," therefore there is often a strong correlation

between the prestige of a group of people and the prestige accorded to the language
they speak,[18] as linguist Laurie Bauer's description of Latin's prestige exemplifies
this phenomenon:
 The prestige accorded to the churchmen, lawyers and scholars who used
Latin was transferred to the language itself. Latin was held to be noble and
beautiful, not just the thoughts expressed in it or the people who used it.
What is called 'beauty' in a language is more accurately seen as a
reflection of the prestige of its speakers.[19]

This phenomenon is not limited to English-speaking populations. In Western Europe,

multiple languages were considered to be of high prestige at some time or another,
including "Italian as the Mediterranean lingua franca and as the language of the
Renaissance; and the 17th-18th century French of the court culture".[20]

Walt Wolfram, a professor of linguistics at North Carolina State University, notes

that he "can't think of any situations in the United States where low-prestige groups
have high-prestige language systems".[3]

Language attitudes
Prestige influences whether a language variety is considered a language or a dialect.
In discussing definitions of language, Dell Hymes wrote that "sometimes two
communities are said to have the same, or different, languages on the grounds of
mutual intelligibility, or lack thereof", but alone, this definition is often
insufficient.[21]

Different language varieties in an area exist along a dialect continuum, and moving
geographically often means a change in the local variety.

This continuum means that despite the fact that standard German and standard
Dutch are not mutually intelligible, the speech of people living near the border
between Germany and the Netherlands will more closely resemble that of their
neighbors across the border than the standard languages of their respective home
countries. Even so, speakers near the border would describe themselves as speaking
a variety of their respective standard languages, and the evolution of these dialects
tends to mirror that of the standard languages as well.[22][23]

That they are classified as such reflects the fact that "language differences are not
only marks of differential group membership, but also powerful triggers of group
attitudes".[24] Such fuzziness has resulted in the aphorism "A language is a dialect
with an army and a navy." That is, speakers of some language variety with political
and social power are viewed as having a distinct language, while "'dialect' is [...] a
term that suggests lower-class or rural speech".[25]

A canonical example of this is the Scandinavian languages, including Danish,

Swedish, and Norwegian, where language differences "constitute barriers to but do
not wholly block communication", but are considered distinct languages because
they are spoken in different countries.[26]

Social class
While some differences between dialects are regional in nature, there are also social
causes for differences in dialects. Very often, the "public prestige dialect of the elite
in a stratified community differs from the dialect(s) of the non-elite strata (working
class and other)".[27] In fact, in an article which in part tried to motivate the study of
sociolinguistics, Raven McDavid wrote that "the importance of language as a mirror
of culture can be demonstrated by dialect differences in American English".[28] Thus
the relation between the way speakers use a language and their social status is a
long recognized tool in sociolinguistics.

In 1958, one of the earliest studies of the relationship between social differences and
dialect differences was published by John Gumperz, who studied the speech patterns
in Khalapur, a small, highly stratified village in India. In all, the village has 31 castes,
ranging from Brahmins and Rajputs at the top, to Chamars and Bhangis at the
bottom, and 90% of the overall population was Hindu, with the remaining 10%
Muslim.[29]

Gumperz observed that the different castes were distinguished both phonologically
and lexically, with each caste having a vocabulary specific to their subculture.[30]
Remarkably, the speech differences between Hindus and Muslims "are of the same
order as those between individual touchable castes and certainly much less
important than the variation between touchables and untouchables".[31]

Gumperz also observed that the lower prestige groups sought to imitate the higher
prestige speech patterns and that over time, it had caused the evolution of the
prestige away from the regional standard, as higher prestige groups sought to
differentiate themselves from lower prestige groups.[31] He concluded that in
determining speech patterns in this community, "the determining factor seems to be
informal friendship contacts" rather than work contacts.[32]

One notable example of the relationship between dialect and social stratification in
English is William Labov's 1966 study of the variable pronunciation of r in New York
City. Labov went to three New York City department stores that catered to three
clearly delineated socioeconomic groups—Saks (high), Macy's (middle), and S. Klein
(low)—and studied how their employees pronounced the phrase "fourth floor". His
results demonstrated that the employees at Saks pronounced r most often, Macy's
employees pronounced r less often, and at S. Klein, seventy-nine percent of the
respondents said no r at all. Another trend Labov noticed was that at all three of the
stores, but Macy's in particular, when prompted to say "fourth floor" a second time,
employees were much more likely to pronounce the r.[33]

Labov attributed his findings to the perceived prestige of each dialect. He noted that
New York City's "dropped 'r' has its origins in posh British speech", but after World
War II, "with the loss of Britain's imperial status 'r'-less British speech ceased to be
regarded as 'prestige speech'".[34] In 1966, when Labov performed his study,
pronouncing words like car and guard with r was then considered an element of
prestige speech.[35] This resulted in middle-class employees, once made conscious of
having to pronounce "fourth floor", altering their pronunciation in order to match
that of the high prestige dialect. The prestige given to r was also evident in the
hypercorrection observed in lower-class speech. Knowing that r-pronunciation was a
prestigious trait, many of the lower-class speakers in another Labov study—in which
speakers were asked to read from word lists—added -r to words that did not have an
r at all. The difference between this study and the "fourth floor" study was the fact
that speakers were closely monitoring their speech, not speaking spontaneously, and
were thus careful to add r in an attempt to mimic a higher social class.[36]

Gender and covert prestige

Non-standard dialects are usually considered low-prestige, but in some situations

dialects "stigmatized by the education system still enjoy a covert prestige among
working-class men for the very reason that they are considered incorrect".[37] These
situations occur when the speaker wants to gain recognition, acceptance, or
solidarity with a specific—and non-prestigious—group of people, or to signal to other
speakers their identification with that group.[38] The idea of covert prestige was first
introduced by William Labov, who noticed that even speakers who used non-standard
dialects often believed that their own dialect was "bad" or "inferior". Labov realized
that there must be some underlying reason for their use of the dialect, which he
identified as a signal of group identity.[8] One example is a 1998 study on the use of
word-final -ing versus -in among college fraternity men in the United States. The
fraternity men used "-in" rather than "-ing," from which the author concluded that
the men used -in to demonstrate what they saw as working-class behavioral traits,
such as 'hard-working' and 'casual,' thus creating a specific identity for
themselves.[39]

Likewise, in studies of the speech patterns in British English, Peter Trudgill observed
that more working class women spoke the standard dialect than men.[40] Farida Abu-
Haidar performed a similar study in Baghdad of prestige in the Arabic language,
after which she concluded that in Baghdadi Arabic, women are more conscious of
prestige than are men.[41] Other areas in which this has been observed include New
Zealand and Guangdong in China.[42][43] As explanation, Trudgill suggests that for
men, there is covert prestige associated with speaking the working class dialect.[6] In
fact, he observed men claiming to speak a less prestigious dialect than that which
they actually spoke. According to this interpretation then, "women's use of prestige
features simply conforms to the ordinary sociolinguistic order, while men deviate
from what is expected."[44] Elizabeth Gordon, in her study of New Zealand,
suggested instead that women used higher prestige forms because of the association
of sexual immorality with lower-class women.[45] Whatever the cause, women across
many cultures seem more likely than men to modify their speech towards the
prestige dialect.

Though women use prestige dialects more frequently than do men, the same gender
preference for prestige languages does not seem to exist. A study of diglossic
societies by John Angle and Sharlene Hesse-Biber showed that the men were more
likely to speak the prestige language than were women.[46] One explanation put forth
for this is that men are more likely to have the means of acquiring a second language
than women.

Language contact
When different languages or language varieties come in contact with one another, a
variety of relationships can form between the two, all typically influenced by
prestige. When the two contact languages have equal power or prestige, they form
adstratum, as exemplified by Old English and Norse, which shared elements with
each other more or less equally.

Far more common is for the two languages to have an unequal power relationship, as
is the case of many colonial language contact situations. Languages that have a
higher status in relation to a certain group often manifest themselves in word
borrowing. One example is in English, which features a large number of words
borrowed from French, as a result of the historical prestige of French. Another
potential result of such contact relationships includes the creation of a pidgin or
eventually creole through nativization. In the case of pidgins and creoles, it is usually
noted that the low prestige language provides the phonology while the high prestige
language provides the lexicon and grammatical structure.

In addition to forming of a new language, known as a creole, language contact can

result in changes to the languages in contact, such as language convergence,
language shift or language death. Language convergence is when two languages
have been exposed for a long period of time and they begin to have more properties
in common. Language shift is when a speaker shifts from speaking a lower prestige
dialect to a higher prestige dialect. Language death is when speakers of a language
die off, and there are no new generations learning to speak this language. The
intensity of the contact between the two languages and their relative prestige levels
influence the degree to which a language experiences lexical borrowing and changes
to the morphology, phonology, syntax, and overall structure of the language.[47]

Language structure
When two languages with an asymmetrical power relationship come into contact,
such as through colonization or in a refugee situation, the creole that results is
typically largely based on the prestige language; as noted above, linguists have
observed that the low-prestige language usually provides the phonology while the
high-prestige language provides the lexicon and grammatical structure. Over time,
continued contact between the creole and the prestige language may result in
decreolization, in which the creole begins to more closely resemble the prestige
language. Decreolization thus creates a creole continuum, ranging from an acrolect
(a version of the creole that is very similar to the prestige language), to mesolects
(decreasingly similar versions), to the basilect (the most “conservative" creole). An
example of decreolization described by Hock and Joseph is African American
Vernacular English (AAVE), in which older, more conservative versions preserve
features such as the completive marker done while newer, less conservative versions
do not.[48]

Some instances of contact between languages with different prestige levels have
resulted in diglossia, a phenomenon in which a community uses a high prestige
language or dialect in certain situations, usually for newspapers, in literature, on
university campuses, for religious ceremonies, and on television and the radio, but
uses a low prestige language or dialect for other situations, often in conversation in
the home or in letters, comic strips, and in popular culture. Linguist Charles A.
Ferguson's 1959 article "Diglossia" listed the following examples of diglossic
societies: in the Middle East and North Africa, Standard Arabic and vernacular
Arabics; in Greece, Katharevousa and Dhimotiki; in Switzerland, Swiss Standard
German and Swiss German; and in Haiti, Standard French and Haitian Creole.[49] In
most African countries, a European language serves as the official, prestige language
(Standard French, English, Portuguese), while local languages (Wolof, Bambara,
Yoruba) or creoles (Ivorian French, Nigerian English) serve as everyday languages of
communication.

In diglossic societies, the prestigious language tends to be very conservative and

resist change over time while the low-prestige language, the local vernacular,
undergoes normal language change. For instance, Latin, the high prestige language
of Europe for many centuries, underwent minimal change while the everyday low
prestige languages which were spoken evolved significantly. If, however, the two
languages are spoken freely, the prestige language may undergo vernacularization
and begin to incorporate vernacular features. An example is Sanskrit, an ancient
prestige language that has incorporated the vernacular pronunciations of [tʃ] and [b]
for word-initial y- and v-.[50]

The prestige language may also change under the influence of specific regional
dialects in a process known as regionalization. For example, in medieval times,
Ecclesiastical Latin developed different forms in various countries where it was used,
including Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, as well as other Roman Catholic nations,
notably in pronunciation – see Latin regional pronunciation. Some of these
differences were minor, such as c before i and e being pronounced [tʃ] in Italy but [s]
in France, but after English underwent the Great Vowel Shift between 1200 and
1600, the vowel system in England became nearly unrecognizable to its European
ecclesiastic counterparts.[51]

See also
Conservative (language)
Decreolization
Language planning and policy in Singapore
List of prestige dialects
Raciolinguistics
Vergonha
The dictionary definition of prestige at Wiktionary

Notes
1. Kroch 1978
2. Eckert & Rickford 2002, pp. 2–4, 24, 260–263
3. Fox 1999
4. O'Grady et al. 2001, p. 7
5. Fasold & Connor-Linton 2006, p. 387
6. Trudgill 1972, p. 194
7. Labov 2006, p. 58
8. Labov 2006, p. 85
9. Ibrahim 1986, p. 115
10. Jenkins 2001, p. 205
11. Haeri 2003
12. Preston 1996, pp. 40–74
13. Leith 1997, p. 8
14. Niedzielski & Preston 2003, p. 44
15. Wardhaugh 2006, p. 335
16. Kloss 1966, pp. 143–144
17. Kordić 2014, pp. 322–328
18. Kahane 1986, p. 498
19. Bauer 1998, pp. 132–137
20. Kahane 1986, p. 495
21. Hymes 1971, pp. 47–92
22. Trudgill 1992, p. 169
23. Wardhaugh 2006, p. 31
24. Haugen 1966b, p. 297
25. Haugen 1966a, p. 924
26. Haugen 1966b, p. 281
27. Kroch 1978, p. 17
28. McDavid 1946, p. 168
29. Gumperz 1958, p. 670
30. Gumperz 1958, p. 675
31. Gumperz 1958, p. 676
32. Gumperz 1958, p. 681
33. Wardhaugh 2006, p. 164
34. Seabrook 2005
35. Wardhaugh 2006, p. 165
36. Wardhaugh 2006, p. 167
37. Leith 1997, p. 96
38. Chambers 1998, p. 85
39. Kiesling 1998, p. 94
40. Trudgill 1972, p. 179
41. Abu-Haidar 1989, p. 471
42. Gordon 1997, p. 47
43. Wang 2008, p. 57
44. Fasold 1990, p. 117
45. Gordon 1997, p. 48
46. Angle & Hesse-Biber 1981, p. 449
47. Winford 2003
48. Hock & Joseph 1996, p. 443
49. Ferguson 1959
50. Hock 1996, p. 340
51. Hock 1996, p. 341

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External links
Do You Speak American? (https://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/prestige/)

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