In Support of Integrating Minority Dialect Literature into the
Curriculum by Stephanie Humphries Ferrum College, 2000 Back to
Dialect Main Page Argument: These books use bad language.
Answer: Such statements have no basis in linguistic fact.
Instead, they are social judgments. As Peter Trudgill (1975, p.
28-29) writes: Judgements which appear to be [about] language
are in fact judgements based on social and cultural values, and
have much more to do with the social structure of our community
than with language. What happens is that, in any society,
different groups of people are evaluated in different ways. Some
groups have much more prestige and status than others, and, as a
result, dialects and accents associated with these groups tend
to be more favourably evaluated than other varieties. Types of
language associated with high-prestige social groups are
therefore considered good and attractive and so on, while other
varieties are evaluated as less good in comparison. Judgements
about good and bad language ar