Chapter 8 Social class SOCIAL CLASS Social classis

Chapter 8 Social class

SOCIAL CLASS Social classis a notion that has its basis in theories of social and political, and theories of social class are associated with figures like Karl Marx and Max Weber. There a number of ways of theorizing and, therefore, defining social class. Though we generally think of it now as being a function of a person’s occupation (and/ or their personal wealth), this is only one way of theorizing it. Marx drew a fundamental distinction between those who produce capital or resources and those who control the production of capital which others produce. The former are the working class and the latter, the middle class.

However, many sociologists reacted against this very simple definition of class. In Weber’s work, class is theorized in terms of social actions, and a great many more social divisions/classes are recognized than Marx’s pair. Individuals’ economic situation might be an important factor in defining what class they belong to, but the influence of economic factors is tempered by people’s life style and life chances. Weber argued that all three of these factors define a person’s status. The shift in definition from Marx to Weber is of particular interest to sociolinguists because Weber’s conceptualisation of class tries to capture the significance of an individual’s participation in a complex set of associated behaviours (including speech, his life style), and also the importance of aspirations and attitudes (life chances)

Like the notion of the speech community, class can be seen as being inherently about division or it can be seen as a construct that emphasises consensuality. The divisions inherent in Marx’s theory of social class were fundamental to his ideas about class conflict. Weber’s theory, on the other hand, allowed for class identity to be shaped by perceived similarity as well as difference. In sum, social class is a measure of status which is often based on occupation, income and wealth, but also can be measured in terms of aspirations and mobility. These factors can then be used to group individuals scoring similarly on these factors into socioeconomic classes.

Mobility and determinism: class vs caste Another important feature of social class that is inherited from the Weber tradition is that however we define class it allows for the possibility of individual mobility. This potential for mobility makes social class different from a caste system. In a caste system, the caste you are born into determines your position within the larger social order for your whole life. Social class may turn out to be similarly fixed; however, it need not be. Nowadays, potential mobility between classes is taken as given. Just because you are born into a working-class family this does not blindly determine that you will be working class forever, and a major change in an individual’s life may profoundly affect the kind of social class they find themselves a part of.

People who are upwardly mobile may feel that living in their old neighbourhood is incongruent with their new social aspirations and so they will move to a larger house or to a street with a ‘better’ address. In a similar way, they may acquire ways of talking that are slightly different to the ones they acquired when growing up. However, there seem to be limits on how much we can change the way we talk as adults, and you can probably think of someone you know whose accent and/or ways of speaking send a different message from the rest of the social picture they present. Changing your accent or native discourse patterns is much harder than moving house.

The reason why it is harder to change your vowels than your address if you are upwardly mobile may be due to developmental factors ( such as the critical period hypothesis). But it is partly also to do with social and psychological factors. Because language is such an integral part of our self-identity, we may also not be prepared to abandonn our original accent as readily as we might abandon our home.

People may also move down the class and status ladder because of changes to their life chances. For example, a doctor, forced to flee her home because of war or persecution, may find that as an immigrant to a new country she has to work as a hospital orderly or nursing aide because her qualifications as a consultant are not recognised in her new home. Her lifestyle and status – that is, her social class – will necessarily drop. She’ll no longer be able to acquire the usual trappings of middle-class life or to participate in middle-class.

The consequences of a downward change in social class are varied and interact with a number of linguistic and social factors. If the drop is involuntary (e. g. , because of forced migration) a person might maintain the linguistic markers associated with the higher social class they grew up in. This would be an indirect way of reminding listeners that the speaker’s current social standing is not one they identify with. On the other hand, she might not want to sound ‘uppity’, in which case she may make an effort to accommodate to the working-class norms her lifestyle now identifies with more.

Measuring social class Social class is a function of the intersection of a whole lot of different social (and sometimes even personal) attributes. So there a number of different ways in which class can be measured, and sociolinguists have tried to use a number of different metrics in their studies of speech communities. Some of the more careful work on class has taken such factors as people’s accommodation into account, giving higher scores to people that own their own homes rather than rent, and even more points to people depending on how much their home is worth and whether they have made structural improvements on the property and carefully maintain its appearance. But perhaps the most frequently used measure is a person’s occupation and/or the occupation of the primary breadwinner in their family when they were growing up.

It is important to note that professions differ in their status in different communities. Most countries have research boards that rank professions according to their local status. This ranking is based partly on the earning power of a typical member of that profession, but it also factors in things like the results from attitude surveys. These attitude surveys ask people to indicate how much they ‘respect’ different profession.

But how reliable is it to use occupation as the principal basis for assigning them to a particular socioeconomic class? If we adopt the more Weberian view that social status or class is derived from a range of social actions, then we would seriously question the validity of this. Perhaps a more sensitive and accurate measure of social class or social status would combine a number of objective factors (like personal wealth and value of home) with subjective factors (like people’s aspirations to social mobility, or their friendship networks).

Class as a factor in linguistic variation We have already seen a lot of evidence that variables are subject to quite systematic stratification in the speech of individuals and groups. For instance, we saw stratification according to speaker style and stratification according to age. And any sociolinguistic variables are stratified according to social class or social groupings. This means that one variant is more frequent in the speech of members of a higher social class and another variant is found more often in the speech of members of a lower class. It is very important to note that these differences are not deterministic – generally, all speakers will use both variants some of the time regardless of their social class. What distinguishes the groups is the relative frequency with which they use each variant, so it is helpful to draw on quantitative methods for analysing this kind of variation.

Many of the linguistic variables that have different distributions in the speech of different social classes are also involved in ongoing change. This means that their distribution is sensitive to more than one nonlinguistic factor: the distribution is stratified by, for example, social class of the speaker as well the age of the speaker. As we saw in the previous chapter, when a variant incrementally increases in frequency in the speech of younger and younger speakers in a speech community, this is a good diagnostic of a change in progress.

it may be helpful to reminder ourselves of Weber’s definition of class or status as a composite of economic wealth, linguistic (and other social) behavior, and attitudes and aspirations. These factors can be used to a varying degree in order to better understand the social meaning of the patterns of variation we find. However, it is important to remember that not all variation involves language change. Some variables are stable, meaning the variants can coexist for many, many years (even centuries) without one ousting the other.

These variables may also show stratification according to social class. In some ways, they provide a more straightforward starting point for exploring the way in which social groups like class may intersect with language variation.

If a variable is relatively stable, that is to say, it has been around in the speech community for some time and shows no signs of going away, speakers may be much more aware of the variation. In this case, speakers very often have positive or negative evaluations associated with different variants, and the different variants will come to be associated with different nonlinguistic attributes. Where one variant is widely perceived to be ‘better’, this very often correlates with more frequent use of this variant by speakers from higher SECs. These variants are usually the ones prescribed in standard speech.

Class stratification with changes in progress By looking at a stable variable we have established that speakers’ use of different variants may be a rough marker of social class within a speech community at large But here, the focus is on examples where the variable involves a change in progress. The overlap and intersection between class stratification and other non-linguistic factors such as style (and gender, in the next chapter) is more interesting when it is enriched by the dynamism of a change in progress.

In Montreal French there is variable deletion of /l/ in words like il ‘he’ and elle(s) ‘she (they, fem. )’, as well as in words like la, the feminine object pronoun. The forms with /l/ are the standard variants, while the variants without the /l/ are considered non-standard). The constraints on /l/-deletion have been studied by a number of sociolinguists in several varieties of French. Findings indicated that speakers of Montreal French from higher occupational groups use more of the conservative form than speakers from the lower SECs do. There is a consistent, monotonic relationship between social class and deletion of l.

A sociolinguistic variable can show fine stratification with respect to a non-linguistic variable such as social class, or it can show broad stratification. Fine stratification means that small changes in overall frequency differentiate the averages for different groups; broad stratification means the frequency with which a given variant occurs in different social classes is relatively more marked. In terms of a line graph, fine stratification results in lines that are bunched closer together, and broad stratification results in lines that have more space between them.

There are several ways sociolinguists test whether class really is important. One way is to use statistical tests that adjust for the relative frequency of a variant in different contexts and among different speakers. Although programs that can do these kinds of tests are quite straightforward to use (and are widely available), if we are just starting out in sociolinguistics they may seem a bit fearsome. These programs allow us to make adjusted calculations of the frequency of a variant.

However, if you’re not into this level of quantitative analysis you can still do a very easy check of whether the variation you see really is a function of social class. You can plot results for class against some other factor, such as style or gender, for instance. If you find that in all styles (however you choose to understand style), you get a consistent effect for speaker status, then you would feel much more confident in saying that a variable is sensitive to social class. This consistent effect might show up as fine or broad stratification– the size of the difference between speakers with different status, occupational or educational backgrounds is not what is important. What is important is the fact of difference.

the cross-over effect So far we have emphasized the orderliness of the stratification of speakers in different social classes. However, there is a famous exception to this orderliness. This is the case where speakers from one social class use even more tokens of a variant that has overt prestige than speakers in the next higher social class do. This phenomenon has been called the cross-over effect. It usually occurs in the most monitored styles such as reading word lists or minimal pairs, and this is taken to reflect the high social value associated with a particular variant. This means the phenomenon is associated with one particular view of style.

Because the cross-over effect is associated with changes in progress – e. g. , Montreal (l)– it is consistent with the important role that the lower middle class and the upper working class play in leading changes in progress. In conjunction with data on speakers’ attitudes to different variants, a cross-over effect can provide important clues about how sound changes disperse through a community. A cross-over effect was famously first observed in the study of New Yorkers’ use of (r)-the presence or absence of a constricted [r] before consonants and word finally. The results indicated in casual speech use of the [r] variant is restricted to the middle-class speakers and does not occur in any of the other classes with very high frequency. However, when they are reading word lists, all speakers use a lot more of the incoming, prestigious variant, and the speakers in the lower middle class, use it most of all.

change from above. Speakers are more aware of the alternation between the innovative constricted [r] and the local r-less vernacular, and the incoming form is generally considered ‘better’. When New Yorkers are asked to evaluate a sentence with constricted [r] and without, they give strong, positive evaluations to the r-ful version. Changes like this, which people are consciously aware of, have been dubbed change from above. ‘Above’ means ‘above the level of conscious awareness’, not necessarily that they originate in higher status social groups.

Change from below: Changes taking place in a speech community below the level of conscious awareness. Not the subject of overt comment. It does not refer to changes led by lower social classes. cross-over effect : hypercorrection: This was an extension of a term usually used to describe overgeneralizations based on imperfect learning of a rule in a new language or dialect. Such overgeneralizations have been recognized for a long time, not only by linguists.

The intersection of class and style When we looked at stratification and cross-over effects, we started to see the important interplay between the way the speech community can be divided into social classes and the way speakers can differentiate within their stylistic repertoire. This interplay is more than a descriptive curiosity. When similar patterns in different domains occur sufficiently often, we have to ask what their co-occurrence tells us. What does it means for two different (and largely independent) factors to pattern alike?

The principal generalization about class and style is that a variant which is favored in the speech of higher social classes also tends to be the variant that is favored in more careful styles of speaking overall. Social class has fallen somewhat out of favor in sociolinguistics these days as a nonlinguistic variable for study. This is true in other social sciences too. One of the problems has been that a lot of researchers feel categorizations into social class have been used uncritically and as if they determine individuals’ lives. Rather than providing the starting point for analysis, researchers have been concerned that something like social class substitutes for analysis. As a result, research on more local or personal identities has largely eclipsed the study of social class.

However, even if we believe that a move to analyzing variation in terms of personal identities is the right thing to do for empirical and explanatory reasons, it is important not to leave anything valuable behind. Where we have found systematic relationships between larger social categories like class and very personal phenomena like style-shifting, we have been given extremely important clues about what a specific variant means to the speakers using it. In addition, the relationship between highly individual behaviors and group behaviours gives us extremely valuable information about how intra-individual variability might be transformed into collective change. In other words, the information about larger group behaviour and individuals’ behaviour complements and enriches both.