We have spoken of the need to take an objective attitude towards people’s language behaviour. This means we should describe it and not judge it. A fact about languages which can be observed without too much difficulty is that they are variable. For one thing, different groups of people speak different dialects of a language. We are all familiar with the idea of different regional varieties. The differences are not necessarily just differences of accent, but may also include differences of grammar and vocabulary. But not all dialectal varieties are regional. There are also class dialects. A dialect is a variety of the language that is used by an identifiable group of speakers, whether these belong to a region or to a social stratum. Dialects are different linguistic systems; not totally different but partly different from each other. Despite their differences, it is not possible to evaluate them one against another. One cannot compare them for merit. It is worth taking special note of this fact, since it is contrary to many popular notions of dialect. The fact is that different dialects acquire different degrees and kinds of prestige or notoriety according to the social role of the groups of speakers who use them. A group of speakers may be respected or despised by other groups of speakers, and quite often their way of speaking is then characterized as meritorious or inferior. But there is no linguistic justification for such a judgement. The different degrees of respect in which different dialects are held is determined by sociological factors, not linguistic ones. In using the term ‘dialect’ here, we mean that the speech of every speaker belongs to one dialect or another; that is, every speaker belongs to some group of speakers who share a variety. We can thus speak of standard dialects as well as nonstandard dialects. A standard dialect is a variety which has wide currency and commands the respect of large numbers of speakers, including
many who do not speak it themselves. their way of using them when writing a business letter, speaking to a stranger on the telephone, writing an essay, chatting to a close friend, and so on. They are said to switch from one register of their language to another. Any speaker who is unable to adapt his language to the varying situations of language use would soon be regarded as behaving oddly. Of course, there are for all of us some kinds of situation that are unfamiliar. If we start to operate in new situations, we may have to learn the appropriate way of using language in the new circumstances; but although some people have a wider experience of social situations than others, everybody has some range of experience and
some range of language variability to go with it.