Principle of Linguistic Inferiority

Written by Alex Levin


Written on . Posted in Language Policy.

Times viewed: 2652

Tagged with: Dialects, Language Policy


Principle of linguistic inferiority refers to the tendency of speakers of the socially dominant group in a society to interpret speech of a subordinate group as linguistically inferior to that of their own.

This bias is likely to be found among the speakers of the ‘standard’ variety of a language due to the differences of various groups in their status and power relations. Linguists consider any dialect/variant of a language to be ‘fundamentally regular’ and worthy of its existence.


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