ABSTRACT
Although the invitation to comment on the papers in this volume allowed a freedom to choose between limited (one or two articles) or extended (all) commentary, any choice is fraught with danger. The danger is the relativist one of ‘point of view’ (Bakhtin 1981), which is also one of the dynamic action-centred issues for social theory itself. I once noted (Wilson 1997) that it was one of sociolinguistics’ interesting paradoxes (for another see Wilson 1987) that when it defended the structural equivalence of accents and dialects, it did so within the chosen dialect/accent of the powerful, the educated and the elite (see Cameron 1994; Pullum 1997; Milroy and Milroy 1998). If I try to claim freedom for my working-class accent/dialect in the accent or dialect of the strong and dominant, then, by this very action, I would seem to have accepted the received view that my working-class accent/dialect was unsuitable for the job — hence the paradox. Sociolinguists are, in the main, standard language users, and when they discuss the language of non-standard users they may become like ethnographers observing and commenting on some other tribe. At its best it can pass for Geertz’s ‘thick’ description (Geertz 1993), at its worst for patronising or divisive and ignorant social engineering (Honey 1998).
