Social class

Social class is one of the social variables by which speech communities are stratified.

It appears to be one of the central concepts in sociolinguistic research, a variable that is extensively studied in sociolinguistic studies. For example, stratifying societies into social classes has given us huge insights into the nature of linguistic variation and change. In every society, individuals are placed into a social hierarchy based on their relation to the production and acquisition of goods and services (Labov, 1966; Michael, 1962). In variation studies, the commonest class indicators/indices normally includes a combination of any of education, occupation, wealth, income, family, intimate friends, clubs and fraternities, manners, speech and general outward behaviour, or just one of these indices (Warner, 1960).

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Chambers (1995), for example, derived his class-indices, occupation, from Canadian evaluations, which have lawyers and biological scientists at the top index score while janitors and cleaners were near the bottom 28.22. Labov (1966) in his New York City study used three indicators: education, occupation and income, to distinguish ten different classes ranging from low-paid labourers with minimal education through to well-educated professionals and business people. Labov’s occupational rank was determined by the following four categories (Michael, 1962: 213):

(i) Professionals, managers, and officials (salaried and self-employed;

(ii) Clerks and salesmen;

(iii) Craftsmen and foremen;

(iv) Self-employed white and blue collar workers-including small shoppers;

(v) Operatives, service workers, labourers, and permanently employed persons.

His Education rank includes:

(i) Complete some college or more;

(ii) Finished high school;

(iii) Finished some high school;

(iv) Finished grade school or less.

Labov grouped these into four strata: lower-class, working-class, lower middle-class and upper-middle class. Trudgill (1974), in his stratification of the ‘-ing’ in words such as ‘sweeping,going’,‘singing’, etc. in Norwich, however, used a more complex index constructed from occupation, income, education, housing type, locality and father’s occupation and gender. The speakers’ position on the scales was used to construct five social classes: lower-working, middle-working, upper-working, lower-middle and middle-middle class (see Labov, 1966).

Following Labov (1966), Haeri (1997) constructed a composite index in her study of gender and class variation, and change in the diglossic setting of Cairo, Arabic, using a weighted index of social factors which was then translated into a small set of social classes. She used four indicators, parent’s occupation, speaker’s education, neighbourhood and occupation, arranged in order of importance. She weighted parents’

occupation as 0.5; speaker’s education, whether the speaker attended a private language school, a private Arabic school, or a public school, with a weight of 0.25; the speaker’s

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neighbourhood, with a weight of 0.1. Using this indices, Haeri was able to put the speakers into four social classes ranging from lower-middle class to upper class: Lower Middle class, Middle Middle-class, Upper Middle class, and Upper Class.

Pederson’s (1965) classification was, however, a more expanded one intended to have a more precise representation of the diversity in the population. He categorised his speakers into 10 and 11 class types based on both education and socioeconomic status of the speakers, using a speech sample from 136 participants across these categories.

Contrarily, some variationists use occupation or education alone as an indicator of class.

For example, Macaulay (1977) had his classification by employing the British Registrar General’s rankings in Glasgow as occupation index. Like Macaulay (1977), Lennig (1978) also used occupation alone as a measure of social class in his study of variation and change in the vowel system of French. He also divided his sample into 3 categories:

(i) Working Class: manual workers who are not self-employed;

(ii) Lower-Middle Class: office employees, secretaries, service personnel, self-employed manual workers, artisans;

(iii) Upper Middle Class: cooperation managers, professionals and students in academic high schools.

Research in Arabic-speaking and other Middle-East countries typically uses education alone as class indicator because access to elite language codes is directly dependent upon Education level (Abdel-Jawad, 1987). A single factor or a combination of factors could, therefore, be used to construct speaker’s social index. The present study uses education alone as the class index of the speakers similar to Abdel-Jawed (1987).

Classifying individuals according to class has so far provided us with a regular pattern of social stratification of variables where the use of non-standard, geographically and ethnically distinct variants correlates inversely with the social status of the speakers. Labov’s 1966 stratification of the New York City English into different social classes, age, ethnicity and gender, is a confirmation of how nonstandard speech correlates inversely with social structures in a society. Labov discovered a higher incidence usage of the rhotic /r/ by speakers from lower-middle class (Macy’s), in a more careful speech than speakers from both working class and upper-middle class in both styles. He believes that Macy’s from lower-middle class were most likely to be

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aware of the prestige forms; hence, accommodating to upper-middle class speech of their clients.

Trudgill’s (1974) examination of the effects of gender on the dialect of different social classes in Norwich through the use the variable ‘-ing’, a choice between the standard variant [ ] and non-standard variant [n] gives us another dimension of social stratification. In this study, Trudgill reported that women, regardless of their social characteristics used more of the standard form than their male counterparts. But interestingly, while women from middle-class group used the standard form more in formal conversation, middle-middle class women never used the non-standard variant at all, whereas lower-working class men used it almost all of the times.

Holmquist’s (1985) study of Ucieda, a peasant village in the Spanish Pyrenees, also reveals a highly nuanced pattern of variation corresponding to two stages in a move towards the mainstream economy. He observes that the local dialect of Ucieda, which had post-tonic /u/, had subsequently been lowered due to accommodation to Castilian form /o/ as a result of rural-urban drift. This lowering happened as the youth from the traditional but poorest farming community moved to the industrial sector in the nearby town. Rickford (1986) questioned the universal applicability of the consensual model of class that has dominated variation studies. He made this comment during his investigation into class differentiation on a sugar plantation in Guyana. In this study, he noted a sharp division in the linguistic behaviours between the Estate Class (those who worked the sugar and lived on the plantation) and the Non-Estate Class (those who worked in the offices and lived off the plantation). The social significance attached to class in every society makes class stratification important in sociolinguistic study such as the present one. It is my hope that by stratifying the E e speakers of English into different social groups, we will be able to establish the phonemic status of the three RP vowels.