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 distinctive enough to constitute a separate dialect. The concept of prestige provides one explanation for the phenomenon of variation in form among speakers of a language or languages.
The presence of prestige dialects is a result of the relationship between the prestige of a group of people and the language that they use. Generally, the language or variety that is regarded as more prestigious in that community is the one used by the more prestigious group. The level of prestige a group has can also influence whether the language that they speak is considered its own language or a dialect (implying that it does not have enough prestige to be considered its own language).
Social class has a correlation with the language that is considered more prestigious, and studies in different communities have shown that sometimes members of a lower social class attempt to emulate the language of individuals in higher social classes to avoid how their distinct language would otherwise construct their identity. The relationship between language and identity construction as a result of prestige influences the language used by different individuals, depending on which groups they do belong or want to belong.
Sociolinguistic prestige is especially visible in situations where two or more distinct languages are used, and in diverse, socially stratified urban areas, in which there are likely to be speakers of different languages and/or dialects interacting often.
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A nonstandard dialect or vernacular dialect is a dialect or language variety that has not historically benefited from the institutional support or sanction that a standard dialect has. Like any dialect, a nonstandard dialect has an internally coherent system of grammar. It may be associated with a particular set of vocabulary, and spoken using a variety of accents, styles, and registers. As American linguist John McWhorter describes about a number of dialects spoken in the American South in earlier U.S.
In linguistics, language death occurs when a language loses its last native speaker. By extension, language extinction is when the language is no longer known, including by second-language speakers, when it becomes known as an extinct language. A related term is linguicide, the death of a language from natural or political causes, and, rarely, glottophagy, the absorption or replacement of a minor language by a major language.
Language convergence is a type of linguistic change in which languages come to resemble one another structurally as a result of prolonged language contact and mutual interference, regardless of whether those languages belong to the same language family, i.e. stem from a common genealogical proto-language. In contrast to other contact-induced language changes like creolization or the formation of mixed languages, convergence refers to a mutual process that results in changes in all the languages involved.
The main purpose of this paper is to show that, if G is a finite p-group which is not cyclic, quaternion or semi-dihedral, then the group of endo-trivial G-modules is detected on restriction to elementary abelian p-subgroups of rank 2. Consequently, the to ...
2005
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In this paper an attempt is made to automatically recognize the speaker’s accent among regional Swiss French accents from four different regions of Switzerland, i.e. Geneva (GE), Martigny (MA), Neuchˆatel (NE) and Nyon (NY). To achieve this goal, we rely o ...
2014
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La réhabilitation des barrages existants impose généralement une augmentation de leur capacité d’évacuation en crue. Dans de nombreuses situations, le PK-Weir (Piano Key Weir) offre à cet égard une solution compacte et efficace. La conception et la réalisa ...