In their concern to treat it like a ‘language’ - i.e. with all the rigour that one reserves ordinarily for the legitimate language - all those who have tried to describe or write the pop., whether linguists or authors, have condemned themselves to producing artefacts which bear more or less no relation to the ordinary speech which speakers least familiar with the legitimate language employ in their internal exchanges.4 Thus, in order to conform to the dominant dictionary model which must only record words seen to have ‘a significant frequency and duration’, authors of dictionaries of unconventional language rely exclusively on texts5 and, making a selection within a selection, subject the speech forms concerned to an essential alteration, by meddling with the frequencies which make all the difference between speech forms and markets which are more or less tense.6 Among other things, these authors forget that to write a speech form which, like that of the working classes, excludes any literary intention (and not transcribe or record it), one must remove oneself from the situations and even the social condition in which it is spoken, and that the interest in these ‘discoveries’, or even the fact of selective recollection alone, excluding everything one comes across also in the standard language, totally undermines the structure of frequencies.
If, notwithstanding their incoherences and uncertainties (and partly due to them), notions belonging to the family of the ‘popular’ are frequently used, even in scholarly discourse, it is because they are deeply embedded in the network of confused and quasi-mythical representations which social subjects create to meet the needs of an everyday knowledge of the social world. The vision of the social world, and most especially the perception of others, of their bodily hexis, the shape and size of their bodies, particularly the face, and also the voice, pronunciation and vocabulary, is in fact organized according to interconnected and partially independent oppositions which one can begin to grasp by examining the expressive resources deposited and preserved in language, especially in the system of paired adjectives employed by the users of the legitimate language to classify others and to judge their quality, and in which the term designating the properties ascribed to the dominant always receives a positive value.7
If social science must give a privileged place to the science which examines the everyday knowledge of the social world, it is not only with a critical purpose and with a view to freeing the understanding of the social world of all the presuppositions it tends to absorb through ordinary
words and the objects they construct (‘popular language’, ‘slang’, patois, etc.). It is also because this practical knowledge, in opposition to which science must establish itself - and first by trying to objectify it - is an integral part of the very world which science is supposed to discover: it helps to create this world by helping to create the vision which agents may have of it and, in so doing, orienting their actions, particularly those aimed at preserving or transforming this world. Thus a rigorous science of the spontaneous sociolinguistics which agents employ to anticipate the reactions of others, and to impose the representation which they wish to give of themselves, would enable one to understand, among other things, a good part of what, in linguistic practice, is the object or the product of a conscious intervention, whether individual or collective, spontaneous or institutionalized. One example of this is all the corrections that speakers subject themselves to or are subjected to - in the family or at school - on the basis of a practical knowledge, partially recorded in the language itself (a ‘sharp accent’, a ‘suburban working-class accent’, etc.), and the correspondences between linguistic differences and social differences based on the more or less conscious observation of the linguistic features which are marked or remarked upon as imperfect or faulty (notably in all the books on form, on what should and should not be said), or, conversely, as valorizing and distinguished.8
