Searching for the best among equals
 Use of different linguistic items by a speaker for communicating the
same message with in different social situation gave birth to the idea
of linguistic and social inequality. When a speaker makes a choice
within the vast range of linguistic choices, the selection made by the
speaker shows a degree of preference for any choice. All this depends on
the social and educational status of the speaker.
Means to say people have different levels of linguistic competence
and linguistic performance which provide basis for the notion of
linguistic inequality. In the same way people with different social and
cultural background shows the levels of social inequality as well as
different social status. In the twentieth century, linguistic
commonalities have been given more importance than the linguistic
differences. The linguists have been trying to find similarities among
all the languages of the world. This century presented the idea that no
variety of language is better than other but that all the varieties of
languages or dialects have common features has been developed among the
linguists.
In fact the laymen have different belief in this regard but the idea
presented by linguists seems sound. In the same way as linguistic
differences show no variety of language, the grammar of the different
languages cannot identically represent any language. Of course, there is
no shortage of differences between grammars, whether of individuals or
the whole communities. But there is no purely linguistic ground for
ranking any of the grammars higher than others.
In spite these notions based on linguistic equality, it is
acknowledged that linguistic and social inequality affects the language
and its use to a great extent.
 Subjective Inequality concerns what people think about each other's
speech. Linguistic Prejudice is a product of subjective inequality.
Linguistic prejudice is the basic cause for delimiting the idea of
linguistic and social inequality. It is a very common notion that people
are thought more or less intelligent or friendly according to the way
they speak. But this is not a reliable yard stick to judge the social
inequality among the people. This is a common thinking that right way of
speaking conveys that the speaker is much valuable than the one who uses
wrong way of speaking. So language is a source of social inequality.
Linguistic Inequality relates to the linguistic items that a person
knows. The linguistic items one knows show the experience of the person.
Vocabulary is the field where this experience can be most obvious where
some individual has a rich set of technical terminology for a particular
field of life e.g. agriculture, fishing, linguistics etc. In different
social situation the people perform differently because of the
linguistic items they know. In other words we can say 'social
inequality' varies situation to situation because of linguistic items
used in different social situations. But the social occasion like job
interviews, political debates have far reaching effects on social life
and social inequality because here interviewee is sketched according to
social and linguistic signals he gives.
Communicative Inequality It is concerned with knowledge of how to use
linguistic items to communicate successfully rather than simply with
knowledge of linguistic items.
In the past the importance of linguistic inequality has been over
exaggerated. But communicative inequality refers to the kind of
knowledge or skill that is needed when using speech to interact with
other people.
It refers to themes related to language, culture, thought, and social
inequality.
Linguistic inequality contains a higher political value. Especially
country like Sri Lanka will benefit if we can minimize the linguistic
inequality among different ethnic groups.
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