Social class
Chapter 8
What is Social Class
 Social class: 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
 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.
Upward and Downward mobility
 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 Changing your accent or native discourse patterns is
much harder than moving house.
 People may also move down the class and status ladder because of changes to their life
chances. 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 best represented by a bundle of features –
occupation, level of education and house value – or if it
can be reduced to occupation alone.
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 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.
Class stratification of stable variables
 One of the best-known and best-described stable variables in English is the (ing)
variable. This is the alternation between [in] and [iŋ] in word-final position (e.g.,
ceiling, pudding, drawing, expecting). Variation between these two variants has
been found in every variety of English in which it has been studied so far, though
(as we will see shortly) different varieties of English differ quite a lot in how often
they use the different forms. Moreover, the variation can be traced back to
structural differences in English that are hundreds of years old. In all varieties of
English the velar nasal variant, [iŋ], is considered to be ‘better’ than the alveolar
variant, [in]. This is partly due to the influence of the orthographic convention of
writing these words with <-ing> at the end, and we can see evidence of this
evaluation in the consistent pattern of shift towards the velar variant that occurs
in outgroup or careful speech.