What does the dominant group do in response to a subordinate group's
adoption of any of these sociolinguistic strategies? Assimilation of the
subordinate group through individual mobility would threaten the dominant
group's psychological distinctiveness, so it would be likely to reassert this by
not recognizing the assimilation that had occurred (as, for example, in the
Williams et al. videotape experiment, 1971), or through creatively divergent
counter-strategies (e.g. inventing new ingroup linguistic markers, or even a
new dialect; see Elias, 1978; Ullrich, 1971). Subordinate group creativity or
competition (strategies 2 and 3) would be likely to elicit reciprocal competition
which might include verbal derogation, abrasive verbal humour or
overtly political action (for a more detailed discussion, see Giles, 1978, 1979;
Giles and Johnson, 1981).