What are the views held by parents with regard to variations in dialect and accent? There are one or two general points to make here first. We must remember that speech styles, however non-prestigious or non-standard they may be in a wider social sense, are still the maternal and regularly-used varieties for given groups; furthermore, in the absence of intergroup con- tact, such varieties would hardly be matters of conscious concern at all. There is, however, ·evidence to suggest that in modem society where cross- group linguistic comparisons are inevitable, low-prestige groups are very much aware of the non-standardness of their speech (Trudgill, 1974). This is the background against which we should consider the views of parents: which is to say, the views of adult members of the child's speech com- munity.