official, or rather, non-standard dialects. As we shall see later on, it is when we start talking about standard and non-standard dialects that many social prejudices and misjudgments come into play. Having made clear some introductory concepts, it should be stated that the remainder of this part of term paper will be primarily concerned with one of the Standard English is mentioned above: English English . This term refers to the English language as spoken only in England. Even though "British English" is more commonly used than "English English" to refer to the same reality, we should not forget that the former is reserved to describe the features common to all UK language varieties (English English, Welsh English, Scottish English , and sometimes Hiberno-English), while the latter is restricted to the kind of English used only in England.mentioned above, dialects are both regional and social, so it is no wonder that any individual speaker s speech shows traces of his/her home town, his/her upbringing, education ... Peter Trudgill calls the reader s attention to the fact that there are certain parallels between the development of social varieties and that of regional varieties. He explains that the development of both regional and social varieties has to do with the existence of barriers: geographical, in the case of regional varieties, and social, in the case of social varieties. [8; 23]
To provide an example of the first kind of barriers, it has been found that Traditional Dialect speakers in the areas of Britain north of the river Humber still have a monophthong in words like house/hu: s/ , whereas speakers south of the river have used a diphthong for several hundred years/haus /. Regional variation is undoubtedly also affected by distance, so the greater the geographical distance between two dialects the more dissimilar they are linguistically. With regards to social dialects, we may say that they are also affected by the same kind of variables to be found when studying regional dialects: barriers and distance. Nevertheless, social barriers and distance are not as clear-cut as geographical barriers and distance may appear to be, for what comes into play now is not something physical (a river, a mountain) but abstract. In fact, the division of society into various strata is nothing but a fairly blurred and abstract classification based on the notion of privilege, which is a concept determined by power, wealth and status. Trudgill holds that it takes a long time for a linguistic innovation that begins among the highest social groups to spread to the lowest social groups, thus emphasizing the para...
