The Standard Is a Factive English

Lane: The standard is valuable. It's incredibly important for tying together all those people around the worldd so doing away with it would be, in a way, counterproductive. Linguists are working this into class rooms. They're taking young students who don't have standard english as their native variety and helping them to translate their home variety into the standard. And then they're also teaching things like the standard versus the dialect, and what that means for issues of class and prestige and power. But this is not really widely taught. Lane: This understanding of english as a bundle of dialects is so much richer and so much more interesting and engaging. You deet need to learn the