Language and class

“Attitudes towards a group’s language reflect attitudes towards a group.” (Mooney and Evans, 2015) Sociolect: language used by a particular social group - Perspective on one’s class leads to linguistic discrimination based on people’s class, accent and variety of English spoken Concepts associated with class: - Prestige - Linguistic discrimination - Accommodation - Class as “other” - Symbolic capital Symbolic capital: intangible assets such as education, connections, mastery of prestigious languages or ability to speak multiple languages, family background, etc. that a person can accumulate to improve their position in a group or society Labels used to index social class in different societies: - “Bogan” in Australia - “Chav” in the UK: (Mooney and Evans, 2015) refers to “a young person of a type characterised by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a lower class status - (Bennett, 2012) Study on Chavespeak “Muvvaa” as Mother “Ave” as have “Aun’ie” as Auntie “Aahyagaahndaahntaahnlayhtaah?” as Are you going downtown later? (Slurring) - “White Trash” in the US - “Minah / Ah Lian” in Singapore The social stratification of English in New York City (Labov, 1966) Rhoticity had been a feature of prestige since the 1940s, Labov hypothesised that rhoticity would feature more heavily in the speech of those with higher socio-economic status. He selected 3 department stores that served as an index of social stratification and asked questions to first elicit the answer “fourth floor” as a natural response, he then pretended to mishear to elicit a more carefully spoken and emphasised response of fourth floor; in this way, Labov could record 4 occurrences of /r/ pronunciation.

- Labov’s results showed generally more occurrences of rhoticity among those representative of the higher class as compared to the lower class, confirming the prestige value of rhoticity and its class stratification - He also found that there is greater /r/-stress when the speaker repeated, and was more emphatic and self-aware - More interestingly, among those representative of the middle class there was a much stronger emphasis on the final /r/ than expected from the steadily rising scale from lower to higher class; this group also showed a heavy emphasis on /r/-pronunciation when they were more aware of their own usage - Labov noted the same phenomenon