The author seems to be writing for a U.S. audience, so most of his examples come from North American English. Similar problems also exist, of course, in other English-speaking places and in other languages. People in Britain, for example, are famously sensitive to class and regional differences in speech. In Japanese (I live in Japan), regional accents and dialects can vary greatly and are also sometimes associated with prejudice and discrimination.
For some languages, a national government might try to fix the pronunciation, grammar, and orthography of a “standard” language. In the 19th century in Japan, there was a partially successful government-led attempt to make a version of Tokyo Japanese standard; school textbooks and, later, the national broadcaster NHK mostly adopted that dialect. The government has also influenced how Japanese is written; the forms of many kanji that now appear in Unicode, for example, were originally decided by government fiat after World War II.
One interesting aspect of American English is that notions of what constitutes “standard” American English—including even spelling—have formed largely independent of the government. Publishers, broadcasters, educators, and a variety of complex social forces have had much greater influence.