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Linguistic Insecurity
The idea of linguistic insecurity was introduced by the American linguist William Labov in his studies of English in New York City in the 1960s. He observed that some speakers, particularly in the lower middle class, judged their own speech harshly against a prestige norm, and that this could show up as hypercorrection: overusing a prestigious form, sometimes beyond where even prestige speakers would use it. In the French-speaking world, the concept was taken up and developed especially from the 1990s, notably by researchers working on French in Belgium, and then applied to Switzerland, Québec, Africa and elsewhere. French is a strong case for this research because the norm has long been strongly associated with Paris, with grammars and dictionaries, and with institutions such as the Académie française, so speakers outside France, and many within it, may measure their speech against a model they feel is not their own. Researchers have also noted the role of schooling: the better speakers know the norm, the more aware they may become of the distance between it and their own speech. The concept remains debated, and how to define and measure it varies from one study to another. That is why a thesis has to say exactly what it means by it.