ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses differences in contemporary attitudes to language between Britain and the United States. It considers some of the outcomes of these differences with respect both to public debates about language and to the way applied sociolinguists who attempt to combat the effects of negative language attitudes have traditionally set their research agendas. There appears to be considerable slippage between British and American uses of the apparently innocuous term ‘standard English’, and default understandings of ‘non-standard English’ are also different. In Britain, unless further specified, the term ‘non-standard English’ most frequently refers to urban vernaculars spoken by indigenous working class British people (as in Cheshire, Edwards and Whittle 1993), while in the United States the default referent is usually African American English (most famously in Labov’s 1969 polemic ‘The logic of nonstandard English’). Thus, non-standardness in the two countries appears to be primarily, but of course not exclusively, associated with different marginalised social groups.
