Towards a taxonomy of metalinguistic commentary: The case of Utah English

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we present meta-linguistic commentary about Utah English, organized into comment types, to paint a picture of how Utahns view their local variety. We then take these comments and sketch out a taxonomy of comments that one might make about language. Our work on this taxonomy is preliminary and requires data from many other dialect regions to be of more universal use. Nevertheless, we lay some groundwork to help quantify one aspect of language regard.