Linguists who teach introductory courses in their discipline
routinely encounter the nonlinguists' knowledge, or lack
of it, about language. Their students are fairly predictable
in their ignorance of basic linguistic concepts: For example,
they typically believe that there in one standard dialect of
English, that a word's true meaning has little to do with
its current usage, and that nonstandard dialects are primitive
languages. In fact, teachers of introductory courses in linguistics
realize that their principal responsibility is to correct the
many and common misperceptions about language that prevail their
culture. In most respects, Folk linguistics is a
systematic study of these misperceptions.