The term dialect has generally had a bad press. Bloomfield, for example, noted that “local dialects are spoken by the peasants and the poorest people of the towns” (1933: 50) though he also thought that the lower middle class spoke ‘sub-standard’ speech. More than 60 years later Hudson observes that the contrast “between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ is a question of prestige, a language having prestige which a dialect lacks” (1996: 36). (He goes on to make the interesting claim that Standard English is consequently a language, which would imply that nonstandard dialects are not part of the same language.) It is hardly surprising that in the more enlightened times of the 1960’s linguists tended to shy away from referring to dialects and looked for a more neutral term that would have less negative connotations (see Section 2). There was also an unfortunate period in the development of generative grammar in the U. S. when disagreements about subjective judgments regarding the grammaticality of dubious sentences were labeled ‘dialect differences’. Such extravagant usage was enough to bring any term into disrepute. However, in recent years many linguists have reverted to the use of the term dialect when dealing with linguistic variation, though the precise definition of the term remains unclear.

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