Answer the following questions about the extract below. For each discussion point, you need to bring in other critical theories you have studied in the course.

Social accents are not bad in any linguistic sense. Nor are any individual vowel and consonant pronunciations bad in themselves. It must be clear that, if it is not bad to pronounce hour and our identically, it cannot be bad to pronounce hill and ill the same either. The only bad thing about lower-social-class accents is that they symbolise low social status. The majority of people who do not speak with a BBC accent therefore run the risk of being discriminated against by undemocratic individuals and institutions in certain social and occupational situations.

Chapter 7 ‘Bad Accents?’ (Penguin 1992)