ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nature of linguistic prejudice. More specifically, it aims to: explore the notion of prejudice more generally in relation to Africa, assess linguistic prejudices in relation to societal variables such as religion, social class and language use, discuss variations of linguistic inequality, bearing in mind the three categories of inequality, namely subjective inequality, lexical or linguistic inequality as well as communicative inequality, explore language context and ethnic group in order to create an understanding that language is environmentally influenced rather than ethnically influenced and assess how language rules may differ across cultures and how this may in turn influence communicative competence. Generally, there are three types of recognized linguistic inequality, which relate to social inequality. The first category is referred to as subjective inequality. The second category of linguistic inequality can be described as strictly linguistic inequality. The third category of linguistic inequality that someone might experience is that of communicative inequality.
