Social Class Flashcards
What is a social network?
A social structure of individuals linked by kinship, friendship, working relationships, social values or ideas
What is an open social network?
Personal contacts that know each other
What is a closed social network?
Where contacts don’t know each other
Who conducted the social climbing in Bradford study and in what year?
Malcom Petyt, 1985
What did the social climbing in Bradford study investigate?
Use of the linguistic feature H-dropping
What did the social climbing in Bradford study find?
The usage was
93% Working class
67% upper working class
12-28% middle class
When was Trudgill’s Norwich study?
1974
What did Trudgill’s Norwich study investigate?
Use of g-dropping in words ending in -ing of those from 5 social classes in varying contexts of formality
What were the results of Trudgill’s Norwich study?
- men g-drop much more that women (tough and masculine)
- women thought they used to-ng more than they did and men thought less
- 0% of lower working class men said -ng whereas 96% of upper middle class men did
- 3% of lower working class women said -ng whereas 100% of upper middle class women did
Who investigated Elaborated and restricted codes and in what year?
Basil Bernstein in 1971
What did the Elaborated and restricted codes study aim to do?
Account for relatively poor performance of working class pupils in language based subjects
What did the Elaborated and restricted codes study suggest?
- suggests working class pupils only use restricted code (informal spoken English, colloquialisms, non standard grammar and simplistic sentence structures) whereas middle class pupils can switch to elaborated codes ( used by teachers and textbooks)
Who conducted the Martha’s Vineyard study?
Labov
Who did Labov look at in his Martha’s Vineyard study?
A small group of fisherman’s language
What was found in the Martha’s Vineyard study?
That fishermen began to exaggerate a tendency already in their speech subconsciously to seem superior to summer visitors. The group were then regarded as old virtues and having desirable views and this gradually became the norm
Who conducted the NYC department store study?
Labov
What was investigated in Labov’s department store study?
How often the final or pre-consonantal r was sound eg in guard, bare and beer by 3 sales assistants (all price and fashion scales)
What did Labovs departments study find?
Sales assistant ants from the top of the price and fashion scale sounded r the most
Who conducted the reading study and when?
Jenny Cheshire in 1982
What was the Reading study investigating?
Use of 11 non standard features by Boys and girls in a reading playground, differentiating between those who approved or disapproved of minor criminal activities
What were the results of the reading study?
That children who approved of minor criminal activity were more likely to use non standard forms, boys more likely but variations in dialect were a conscious choice based on social attitude
Who conducted the social networks study in Belfast?
Milroy
What was the social networks study in Belfast investigating?
Correlation between integration of individuals and the way they speak in 3 working class communities (poor, working class, high unemployment). This was done by giving each person a network strength of 1-5 depending on knowledge of others in community, workplace and at leisure activities
What were the results of the social networks study in Belfast?
- high network score = non-standard forms
- men non standard forms due to dense social networks
