- Standard English basically is the most acceptable dialect by most of English language speakers. It is follow the rules of standard form. Particularly those who are well educated in English.
- Non-Standard English is one essential way of speaking English that does not follow the rules of standard form.
The most controversial form of Non-Standard English is "ain't". In Standard English, people change "ain't" to "am not", "is not", "has not", "have not", depending on the subject tense used. ( G. Leech citied in Widarso. W, 1994, 52 )
Examples:
- STANDARD
- We are not going anywhere
- NON-STANDARD ENGLISH
- We ain't goin' nowhere
Notice that the last sentence of the above Non-Standard English contains two double negative forms. One is "not" in the word "ain't", and the other is "no" in the word "nowhere" which means not anywhere.
It is common in Non-Standard English using double negative form but in Standard English is a big mistake. The letter "g" in the word going in the above example is omitted and the omission is the typical for Non-Standard English. It is probably caused by the difficulty in saying to consonants together, or it may be caused by the laziness to use the participial form completely,
for examples:
- Tol' (told)
- Ghos' (ghost)
- Jus' (just)
- Mus' (must)
- An' (and)
However, it is not only the consonant of the last letter of a word which is omitted, it often occurs when the middle letter lies besides another consonant like the word Le's which come from the word Let's.
Examples:
- Make him happy! (Standard)
- Make 'im happy! (Non-Standard)
- Don't let them down! (Standard)
- Don't let 'em down! (Non-Standard)
From the examples above, we can synthesize that the typical usage of Non-Standard is does not follow the rules of Standard English.
However, we can not come up to the idea that Non-Standard English is not good or bad. It is only because we are not suggested to use a Non-Standard language, to talk to an well educated person, let alone when we are talking in formal occasion.
