ABSTRACT
We have in Chapter 3 already touched upon the relationship of language to social class. Accent and dialect, we noted, have more than a purely regional basis: they have come to act as indicators not only of one’s relationship to a locality but also of one’s social class position. In signalling such information, features of pronunciation and sentence structure have assumed obvious social significance. Considered in strictly linguistic terms, however, the differences remain relatively inconsequential. The fact that some dialects use ‘we was’ rather than ‘we were’ or ‘we never done nothing’ rather than ‘we didn’t do anything’ is no sign of deficiency or even eccentricity on their part. After all, the double negative, for example, was com mon in the English of Shakespeare and is a normal construction in contemporary French. These features have no intrinsic consequences for our capacity to communicate with each other, in the sense, for example, of restricting the range of meanings we can express.
