Language Diversity) Lamguage And Social Class Flashcards
Sociolect
The dialect associated with a social group
Overt prestige
Dialect used by culturally powerful group
Covert prestige
Non standard languages or dialects that’s regarded as being of high linguistic prestige by members of a speech community, but not by the culturally powerful
Class
Cultural, economic and social standing of a group of ppl
Capital
Wealth, money (in sense of economic capital), figurative in sense of cultural and social capital
Linguistic marketplace
A metaphor for social interactions within a given context
Class aspiration
Desires of an individual to graduate to the next social class
Hypercorrection
Attempts to be more correct leads to more mistakes
Code switching
Ability to switch between two languages,dialect , sociolect under different circumstances
Linguistic insecurity
A concern that one’s language is insufficient in someway
Social mobility
The ability to change social classes
Marxist defintion of class
Revolves around production - bourgeois own means of product, whilst proletariat sell their labour to them
Can only be stopped by a revolution
Webers defintion foc lass
He proposed theory of stratification - focused on relationship between class, power and status
Class - description of someone’s economic standing
Status - description of someone’s prestige
Power - description of someone’s ability to enact change in the face of resistance
Types of capital. 3
Economic
Cultural
Social
Economic capital determined by…
Cash, bank account, investments, assets
Cultural capital determined by…
Beliefs, types of food, sports etc
Social capital determined by…
Friends, free time activities etc
Bourdieu study
Recognise the language as a key units of capital when calculating someone’s social class Highlighted that more prestigious forms of language granted the speaker higher quantities of capital
Whose study was of language and capital
Bourdieu
Labov study
Went into 3 different department stores in New York, and asked each employee where he’d find specific department (all representative of different classes) Employee said 4th floor, and labov asked again - found higher the social class = more employees vocalised /r/ in ‘fourth’ Data shows upper class store used most prestigious form of language Middle class store when repeating showed desire to be prestigious Lowe class store showed lack of desire to be prestigious Shows significance of aspiration of being in a social class impacts their language heavily
Study of department stores
Labov
Trudgill study
Studied grammar of 50 adults and 10 kids in Norwich
Found lower social class= more likely non standard variables were used (eg glottal stops)
Men also more likely to use non standard variables than women, thus suggesting women gravitate towards prestigious variations of language
Who was the Norwich study
Trudgill
Petyt study
Investigated frequency of h dropping among speakers in Bradford
Found lower social class= more likely to h drop
Lower middle class = 12% H’s used
Middle middle class= 93% h’s used
Who’s study was on h dropping
Petyt
Linguistic insecurity tends to correlate with …
Whose most likely o feel linguistic insecurity
Perceived lack of value in ones linguistic capacity
Women and those in lower middle class
Why are women seen as more linguistically insecure than men
To avoid being threatening
More self doubt than men
Studies associated with language and social class. 4
Petyt
Trudgill
Bourdieu
Labov
