[ExI] Linguistic Markers of Class

[Lee Corbin]

Gordon writes

> Lee Corbin wrote:
> 
>> Besides the obvious dropping of the 'g's in "ing" words, what other
>> linguistic markers of class have people noticed?
> 
> Though born and raised in the suburbs of the SF Bay Area, I left Ca long  
> ago and never looked back. Since then I have lived all over this great  
> land, among the rich and the poor from North to South to East and West.  
> I've noticed many different dialects and ways of speaking, and I have to  
> say it's a bit disturbing to me to think of them as linguistic markers of  
> "class". Am I being too PC, Lee? Maybe.

You are probably not being too PC. After all, it's obvious that not
all linguistic markers reflect the class of the speaker. Here, of course,
I am speaking of the three major classes:

Upper (or high) class:  the very rich, or those who've been raised
                                         by the very rich. Old money. 

Middle class:        the bourgeois, the professionals, the highly skilled
                                        (e.g. accountants, college teachers, executives, etc.)

Low class:           blue collar, also called "the proles" by Fussell and Orwell
                           Today many elementary and high school teachers are lower
                           class, which has changed from 1950.

Fussell's book explains all this in great and highly amusing detail. And as
anyone who's read the book with an open mind will agree, he's dead
right.  The three classes do exist.  Of course, there are gradations between
them, and exceptional people who don't seem to easily fit any category,
and so on. But it's as real as the left/right political spectrum, if not more so.

Fussell noted many common characteristics and indicators of the classes.
See the great Amazon reviews at 
http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
for a lot of them. And he did list linguistic hints as one strong sign.

But for me, *nothing* reveals class so surely as the way that people speak.
It tells you who they grew up with and probably even who they associate
with now. The use of euphemism, for example,  "Mr. Potter passed away...",
instead of "Mr. Potter died..." often indicates lower as opposed to middle
or upper class origins.  Upper class people do have a distinctive manner,
though the ones I've met are west-coast types, and the effect is greatly
watered down.

> However I do find dialects 'outside the mainstream' to be interesting and  
> sometimes amusing. One of my favorites is the dialect I noticed in rural  
> parts of Penn, while living near the Amish and among the 'Pennsylvania  
> Dutch'. In those parts of the country it's not unusual to hear people  
> utter such absurdities as, "Throw the horse over the fence some hay." (!?)
> 
> But again I'm reluctant to say these rural people are "low-class". They've  
> just resisted assimilation. More power to them, I say.

It could easily be that since there are so few rural people anymore
that they now tend to resist categorization. Still, one would assume
that rural types will show up as having more of the characteristics
that Fussell identified as lower class.

Lee

> Back in the 90's I published a glowing website in celebration of the Amish  
> people and their dialect, beliefs and customs. Funny, though, I never  
> received any thank you emails.