Prestige, Overt and Covert

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Different lexical alternants, pronunciations, or languages that coexist within a speech community may have more or less prestige within that speech community. Shared orientation to different forms of prestige is sometimes used as a diagnostic of a speech community. Prestige is relative to different domains or situations of use. There may be several prestige forms within a community; different speakers may be more oriented to supralocal and local markers of prestige. In addition, subjective reaction tests may indicate that there are norms that have covert prestige in a speech community. The relationship between prestige and crossover (sometimes called hypercorrection) is explored.

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Miriam Meyerhoff teaches sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She is interested in aspects of language variation and change and has conducted research on structural change in creole languages in the Pacific (Vanuatu and Hawai'i) and the Caribbean (Bequia). She has also worked on changes taking place in New Zealand English and has investigated the role that variation plays in understanding the social construction of gender. She is the author of Constraints on null subjects in Bislama (Vanuatu) (2000) and co-editor of The handbook of language and gender (2003).

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