Nancy A. Niedzielski & Dennis R. Preston, Folk linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Pp. xx, 375. Hb.

Abstract

Linguists who teach introductory courses in their discipline routinely encounter the nonlinguists' knowledge, or lack of it, about language. Their students are fairly predictable in their ignorance of basic linguistic concepts: For example, they typically believe that there in one standard dialect of English, that a word's true meaning has little to do with its current usage, and that nonstandard dialects are primitive languages. In fact, teachers of introductory courses in linguistics realize that their principal responsibility is to correct the many and common misperceptions about language that prevail their culture. In most respects, Folk linguistics is a systematic study of these misperceptions.