ABSTRACT
Standard English is, at the time of writing, a controversial subject in Britain. On the one hand, the present government’s National Curriculum for Schools stipulates that Standard English is the dialect of English that should be taught in schools. It is held that schoolchildren ought to be taught this variety if they are not to be at a disadvantage when they leave school. Sociolinguists, on the other hand, claim that Standard English is a social dialect, with only about 12–15 per cent being native speakers, all of whom belong to the upper and middle classes. 1 They point out that the effect of continuing to prescribe the use of the Standard English dialect in schools will mean that the majority of British schoolchildren will continue to be taught that their own variety of English is inferior, and that they cannot speak the English language correctly (a situation that has long prevailed in Britain). It is better, they argue, to change the long-standing prejudice with regard to non-standard dialects, than to continue to stigmatise the speech of generations of speakers. This debate has been raging for several years now, with sociolinguists and teachers on the one hand opposing the government on the other, to the extent that ‘the noisy debate on Standard English is largely perceived as a battle between Right and Left’. 2
