The variety spoken by middle-aged and younger Virgin Islanders today is of a mesolectal form that still retains numerous creole features, yet is slightly closer to standard English than the basilect spoken by older islanders.
12.
Like most Anglophone Caribbean islands, a post-creole speech continuum exists, in which there are two extremes standard English ( known as the " acrolect " ) and the creole in its most distinct, or " raw ", form ( known as the " basilect " ).
13.
Locals are often fluent both in the local English variety and the local creole languages and code-switching between them is frequent, indeed another way to conceptualise the relationship between Creole and Standard varieties is to see a spectrum of social registers with the Creole forms serving as " basilect " and the more RP-like forms serving as the " acrolect ", the most formal register.
14.
Leonese ( in the sense of the whole linguistic group ) was once regarded as an informal dialect ( basilect ) of Spanish, but in 1906, Ram�n Men�ndez Pidal showed it was the result of Aragonese dialect, and finally and in last place by Castilian, which, nowadays, due to the political integration process produced during the last eight centuries, has absorbed almost completely to the other two dialects.
15.
The new Western term " Formal Spoken Arabic " ( other terms include : " Educated Spoken Arabic, " " Inter-Arabic, " " Middle Arabic, " and " Spoken MSA " ) is to describe a modern, hybrid-level variety of Arabic spoken by educated Arabs, a mix between standard Arabic ( " acrolect " ) and vernacular Arabic ( " basilect " ).
16.
Use of the terms " acrolect ", " mesolect " and " basilect " attempts to avoid the value judgement inherent in earlier terminology, by which the language spoken by the ruling classes in a capital city was defined as the " correct " or " pure " form while that spoken by the lower classes and inhabitants of outlying provinces was " a dialect " characterised as " incorrect ", " impure " or " debased ".
