Prestige

Translations

prestigio | prestige | Prestige

Article

In sociolinguistics, a prestige language or dialect is a language or variety thereof that is considered socially prominent within a multilingual or diglottic community (Labov, 1972; Beccaria 1994, 602). When dealing with contact scenarios, a prestige variety is normally represented by the superstratum.

The notion of prestige is related to the concepts of code-switching and to the more articulated, yet less widespread, distinction of akrolect (the highest variety), mesolect (the intermediate variety) and basilect (the lower variety, cf. Bickerton 1965).

Example

Cases of diglossia are hard to exemplify for the ancient Anatolian and Near Eastern world, because lower varieties frequently tend not to be written down, and because cases of code-switching in written documents are rare and motivated by specific pragmatic reasons (e.g., employment of a technical language for specific parts of documents).

A reasonable example of a prestige language, however, is the Old Babylonian variety of Akkadian during the earliest phases of the Hittite kingdom. In such a phase, Akkadian was employed as the written language used to record texts that were probably originally (orally?) composed in Hittite, thereby resulting in calques of Hittite substratum structures and phraseologies, as in the case of the phrase pahru ibbašû, an Akkadian non grammatical verbatim rendering of the Hittite periphrastic form taruppanteš ešer, "were united", the Edict of Telipinu. For another example of Hittite interference in the Akkadian used in early Hittite documents, cf. also substratum.

References

Beccaria, G.L. 1994. Dizionario di Linguistica. Torino. Bickerton, D. 1965. Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge. Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia.