hard · GRE Verbal Reasoning
It is tempting to explain the decline of a once-dominant dialect by appeal to the prestige of its rival: speakers, we suppose, abandon the low-status form for the high. Yet prestige is often invoked after the fact to dignify a shift already underway for humbler reasons. In several documented cases, the receding dialect lost ground first among the young in market towns, where the incoming form was simply the language of the people one most needed to transact with. Prestige, where it appears, tends to attach to whichever variety is already winning; it consolidates a change rather than initiating it. The explanatory arrow, in other words, may point the other way.
With which of the following would the author most likely agree?
- Prestige plays no role whatsoever in the course of language change
- A dialect's prestige is frequently a consequence of its spread rather than its cause
- Economic transaction is the sole determinant of which dialect prevails in a region
- The young are inherently more resistant to linguistic change than their elders are
- High-status dialects will inevitably displace low-status ones over time
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