Language and Social Class

Language what we speak reveals a lot of things about us, including our social
status. It is possible to observe some different uses of linguistic features among
different social status. Although it is hard to determine these differences because of the
consistency of changes, some linguists have developed efficient methods for observing
the changes. For example, Labov had carried out interviews with individuals from
various social classes. With a rich spectrum of informants, he had got valuable results
for Sociolinguistics.
Before Labov’s technique, linguists mostly focus on idiolects. Because
examining idiolects is relatively easy comparing to dialects. Even changes in idiolects
are very common, its number is lower than the variations in dialects.
As portrayed in figure 1, among people from the highest class there are few
changes in their speech lexically and grammatically, because they mostly use Standard
English. On the contrary, There are a lot of different usages among lowest class such
as ‘bogle,flay-crow…..’ instead of scarecrow. As we can see in table 3, people from
most localized areas in Britain tend to pronounce the ‘home’ word in different ways.
While intermediate section has a few differences in pronouncing the ‘home’ word.
A survey which is conducted in Detroit and Norwich reveals a correlation
between social class and usage of –s. According to the results, Middle Class uses –s
affix properly, but most of the working class don’t use –s and these forms such as ‘She
like him very much.’ occur.
Another example is about the negation of sentences. There are two possibilities
in terms of negating. We can negate the verb or pronoun. Double-negation doesn’t
appear in Standard English. Lower working class from Detroit uses double negation
70%, while upper-middle class uses it 2%. So we can say that there is a clear
relationship between grammatical change and social class.
The pronunciation of individual vowels and consonants shows varieties in some
regions. In Norwich, Trudgill has conducted a survey to examine differences on some
consonants such as ng, t and h . As a result, he saw that the vast majority of Norwich
speakers use two types of pronunciations for these consonants. Most of lower working
class use non-rp forms while middle-middle classes use them more properly.
All these studies tell us how the correlation between language and social class
has shaped. Though it is hard to study on social classes and language, linguists work
on it and give a wide insight into social dialects for us.

summarized by Zeynep Keskin