10.7 Sociolinguistic correlations: Social status

You probably have an intuition about social class and a hierarchy of status in society that is linked with the unequal distribution of wealth and power. You probably also recognize that this inequity is not arbitrary and intersects with other social factors. At the same time, social class is less tangible than other social facts about people like their age, their gender, and their ethnicity. In Euro-American society since the Industrial Revolution, people have been categorized into three groups: ‘upper class’, ‘middle class’, and ‘lower class’. The implied hierarchy of these traditional categorizes reflects the distribution of wealth and power: the ‘upper’ or ruling class holds the most and the ‘lower’ or working class holds the least. Sociological definitions of social class look to objective measures like property ownership, wealth, income, and occupation and subjective measures like life chances, prestige, and reputation in categorizing class membership. In the Canadian context, social class seems that much more intangible because, while we are largely a middle class society, when we consider those at the bottom of the social class hierarchy, there are important interactions and intersections with both geography and other social factors, especially race and ethnicity. Geographically speaking, there tend to be specific areas both within cities and in remote areas that are socioeconomically less advantaged. With respect to race and ethnicity, Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour (especially those who have immigrated recently), are also, on aggregate, in a more socioeconomically precarious situation.

While social class can be a fuzzy concept, it’s still an intuitive reality. To investigate the role of social class as a conditioning factor of linguistic variation, we need to come up with ways of ‘diagnosing’ or measuring it. Often times, someone’s occupation (or sometimes their parents’ occupations), their education, their income, or their residence can be used as an indication of their social class. In William Labov’s (1966) study of variation in the English spoken in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he made use of three parameters to categorize people into different social classes: occupation, education, and income. Labov examined many different linguistic variables in his data and found extensive correlations between the frequency of use of different variants and an individual’s social class, according to his measure.

In Figure 10.4. below, based on one of Labov’s results, we can see that the frequency of use of the [ɪn] variant of -ing exhibits social stratification. Participants in the working class speakers have the highest rate of this variant, upper class speakers use [ɪn] the least, and people in the middle of the social class spectrum are somewhere in-between with respect to -ing.

Importantly, Figure 10.4. also demonstrates systematic style shifting as discussed in section 10.4. Where Fischer observed one young man shifting his frequency of use of [ɪn] as the formality of the context shifted, here we can see that this happens across the board: in all social classes, the casual speech context contains more [ɪn] tokens than the reading passage context.

References

Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York city. Cambridge University Press.