Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T16:03:33.860Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2002

Joseph L. Subbiondo
Affiliation:
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA 94103, [email protected]

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.

Type
REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)