Universidad Latina de Costa RicaCentro Internacional de Postgrados

Maestría Ciencias de la Educación con énfasis en la Enseñanza del Inglés

Sociolinguistics

Social Class and LanguageFinal Project

Carlos Araya

Vanessa Bolaños

Marcela Israelsky

INTRODUCTION

Understanding language in society means that one has to understand the social groups in which language is embedded.

Probably the most important factor in the way social class determines language use is the tendency of society to connect social values to different types of language use.

Language use can also be interpreted as a means of social prejudice.

Class and occupation are among the most important linguistic markers found in society. One of the fundamental findings of sociolinguistics, which has been hard to disprove, is that class and language variety are related.

The general objective of this final project paper is to investigate about the relationship between social class and

language use.

GENERAL OBJECTIVE

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES

1. Defining what social class is.

2. Exploring social class and language relation from a historical point of

view.

3. Researching how social class affects language from a linguistic point

of view.

4. Exemplifying linguistic features, by carrying out a shallow field work

among young Costa Rican people according to their social class.

SOCIAL CLASS

WHAT IS A SOCIAL CLASS?

• Social class involves grouping people together according to their status within society and according to the groups they belong to.

• Different social classes can be distinguished by inequalities in such areas as power, authority, wealth, working and living conditions, life-styles, life-span, education, religion, and culture.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

• Early in the nineteenth century the labels "working classes" and "middle classes" were already coming into common usage.

• The old hereditary aristocracy, reinforced by who owed their success to commerce, industry, and the professions, evolved into an "upper class“

• They had control over the political system, depriving not only the working classes but the middle classes.

VARIABLES OF SOCIAL CLASS

• Power: The degree to which a person can control other people.

• Wealth: Objects or symbols owned by people which have value attached to them.

 

• Prestige: The degree of respect or importance given to a person by members of society.

• In sociolinguistics, prestige describes the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect as compared to that of other languages or dialects in a speech community.

• The concept of prestige in sociolinguistics is closely related to that of prestige or class within a society.

PRESTIGE

IMPACT OF SOCIAL CLASS IN LANGUAGE

• Social class greatly influences the way a person speaks.

• The higher the person is on the social ladder, the more educated that person is likely to be.

• Language is the most common way to signify an affiliation with a certain social class.

• In conversations with others, most people unconsciously change their speech to resemble the person they are talking to.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL CLASS AND LANGUAGE

USE

• The measurable differences in language result from entirely different modes of speech found within the classes.

• People in a higher level of Social Class use better language. They have access to more education than the lower classes, so they are more proficient in correct language use.

• The rise of urbanization is connected with an increase in social stratification reflected in linguistic variation.

STANDARD AND NONSTANDARD LANGUAGE

• In a study made by Hayes, he demonstrated that there is no one feature that only identifies a person as belonging to one social class or another.

• What identifies the speaker as educated, as middle class, as uneducated, or as socially and economically deprived, is that in his or her speech the proportion of non-standard features is higher or lower.

FIELD WORK

CONCLUSIONS

• Linguists have pointed out for some time that differences in language are closely related to social class.

• In the process of wishing to be associated with a certain class (usually the upper class and upper middle class) people who are moving in that direction socio -economically will adjust their speech patterns to sound like them.

• It is generally assumed that non-standard language is low-prestige language. This is because the social class language use is a powerful group marker.

• There is no doubt that language is one of the most powerful human being’s tools. William Cowper once expressed that “variety is the spice of life.” No matter what kind of language a person from any structured social group uses, its use adds variety to language, and therefore to life.

THANK YOU!!!