The relations of power that obtain in the linguistic market, and whose variations determine the variations in the price that the same discourse may receive on different markets, are manifested and realized in the fact that certain agents are incapable of applying to the linguistic products offered, either by themselves or others, the criteria that arc most favourable to their own products. This effect of the imposition of legitimacy is greater - and the laws of the market are more favourable to the products offered by the holders of the greatest linguistic competence - when the use of the legitimate language is more imperative, that is, when the situation is more formal (and when it is more favourable, therefore, to those who are more or less formally delegated to speak), and when consumers grant more complete recognition to the legitimate language and legitimate competence (but a recognition which is relatively independent of their knowledge of that language). In other words, the more formal the market is, the more practically congruent with the norms of the legitimate language, the more it is dominated by the dominant, i.e. by the holders of Ihe legitimate competence, authorized to speak with authority. Linguistic competence is not a simple technical capacity but a statutory capacity with which the technical capacity is generally paired, if only because it imposes (he acquisition of the latter through the effect of statutory attribution (noblesse oblige), as opposed to the commonly held belie! that regards technical capacity as the basis for statutory capacity. Legitimate competence is the stalutorily recognized capacity of an authorized person - an ‘authority’ - to use, on formal occasions, the legitimate (i.e. formal) language, the authorized, authoritative language, speech that is accredited, worthy of being believed, or. in a word.
performative, claiming (with the greatest chances of success) to be effective. Given that legitimate competence, thus defined, implies the effectiveness of the performative, one can understand how certain experiments in social psychology have been able to establish that the efficacy of an utterance, the power of conviction which is granted to it, depends on the pronunciation (and secondarily the vocabulary) of the person who utters it; that is, through this particularly reliable measure of statutory competence, it depends on the authority of the speaker. The practical evaluation of the symbolic relation of power that determines the criteria of evaluation prevailing in the market concerned takes into account the specifically linguistic properties of discourse only in so far as they express the social authority and social competence of those who utter them. They do so in the same way as other non-linguistic properties such as the character of the voice (nasalization or pharynxization), a durable disposition of the vocal apparatus that is one of the most powerful of social markers, and all of the more overtly social qualities such as aristocratic and academic titles: clothing, especially uniforms and formal dress; institutional attributes like the priest’s pulpit, the professor’s platform, the orator’s rostrum and microphone, all of which place the legitimate speaker in a pre-eminent position and structure the interaction through the spatial structure which they impose on it; and, finally, the very composition of the group in which the exchange occurs.
Thus the more formal a situation is, the more likely it is that the dominant linguistic competence will function in a particular market as linguistic capital capable of imposing the law of price formation which is the most favourable to its products and of procuring the corresponding symbolic profit. For the more formal the situation is, the more it is able to impose by itself alone the recognition of the legitimacy of the dominant mode of expression, converting the optional variants (at least on the level of pronunciation) which characterize it into imperative rules, ‘de rigueur' (like black ties at formal dinners), making the recipients of these linguistic products more inclined to know and recognize the legitimacy of this mode of expression, even outside the constraints of the formal situation. In other words, the more these different conditions converge and the higher the degree to which this occurs on a market, the narrower the gap between the values accorded in practice to the linguistic products which confront each other on that market and the theoretical value which would be attributed to them, in a hypothetical unified market, in relation to their position in a complete system of linguistic styles.
Conversely, as the degree of formality in an exchange situation and the degree to which the exchange is dominated by highly authorized speakers diminish, so the law of price formation tends to become less unfavourable to the products of dominated linguistic habitus.
