Some people, but not Grice, regard Grice's maxims -- I'm wedded to this idea by Kramer that they are best dubbed, quantitative, qualitative, relative and modal maxims -- as "norms".
Oddly, in modern Italian, "Norma" is a feminine name. My mother wanted to call me "Normus" but thought I would be the laughing stock at Vasaar.
Anyways.
D. R. Preston has contributed a gem to Trudgill/Bauer's _Language Myths_ (Penguin).
The title of his thing is
"They speak really bad English Down South & in New York City".
Preston presents a map of USA on p. 143, which features "Norma"
-- "Fig. 2: "Hand-drawn map of a Michigan respondent's idea of the dialect areas in the US." -- which has 6 distinct "dialects":
Section of the map marked
* British New England
* _Average_ _Normal_ Michigan
* Southerners The South.
* Shiny Side California
* Eskimo's Alaska
* Hillbillies (Texans) Texas
The labels for the dialects are those used by the informant itself (in his
own handwriting). Preston comments: "Informal assessments are bolstered by
quantitative studies. Nearly 150 people from SE Michigan (of European
ethnicity) rated (on a scale of 1 to 10) the degree of 'correctness' of
English spoken in the 50 states. The responses confirm what every American
knows: the lowest ratings are for the South and New York City. It is also
clear that the
Michiganders doing these ratings
THINK PRETTY WELL OF THEMSELVES;"
or theirselves as I'd respectfully say.
For "they give their home state a ranking in the '8' range, the only area so
rewarded. Linguists call such logal hubris 'linguistic security'. It is not
hard to determine why: Michinganders believe another interesting myth --
that they do not speak a dialect at all. When Michigan respondents carry
out another task, which asks them to draw ON A BLANK MAP of the US where
they think the various dialect areas are and label them, results such as
Figure 2 [my fig. above. JLS] emerge, confirming their local linguistic
pride. The respondent who drew Figure 2 places only Michigan in the
'normal' area. If one studies a large number of such hand-drawn maps, it is
possible to produce a generalised map such as Figure 3. ... The most
important thing to notice is the number of Michigan respondes who drew a
South (138 out of 147 -- 94%). Even the home area is registered as a
separate speech region by only 90 respondents (61%). The third most
frequently drawn area is the area which contains NYC (80, 54%). These
Michiganders seem, therefore, to hear dialect differences not as linguists
do -- on the basis of objective differences in the language system -- but
on the basis of their evaluation of the correctness of areas. The
linguistic South, the area perceived most consistently as incorrect, quite
simply exists for these respondents more than any other area. ... One South
Carolina respondent identifies everything nort of the Mason-Dixon line with
the notation
'Them -- the Bad Guys'
in contrast to the label for the entire South:
'Us -- the Good Guys'.
Other Southerners note that Northern speech is 'mean' or 'rude', and one
calls it 'scratch and claw'. Southerners pretty clearly suffer from what
linguists would call 'linguistic insecurity', but they manage to deflect
the disdain of Northerners to adjecaent areas rather than suffer the
principal shame locally. The South is thought to be rural, backward, and
uneducated; its dialect is quite simply associated with the features
assigned its residents. NYC fares little better. As one of Labov's
respondents told him in the mid 1960s,
'They think we're all murderers'.
Like all groups who are prejudiced against, Southerners (and New Yorkers)
fight back by making their despised language variety a solidarity symbol,
but there is no doubt they suffer linguistic insecurity in spite of this
defensive maneuver."
The biographical note reads that Preston is a
"prof of linguistics at
Michigan St University in East Lansing." "An old dialectologist who has
been transformed into a linguist. He is interested in the perception of
language and language varieties by non-linguists and in attitudes towards
varieties which are prejudiced against."
Cheers!
and Etc.
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