[ExI] Linguistic Markers of Class

[Lee Corbin]

gts writes

>> But for me, *nothing* reveals class so surely as the way
>> that people speak.
> 
> Really? I'm much more interested in the way people act.

The way people act is indeed much more important, and is
how I judge people. Generally, I suppose that people cannot
much help the way they speak any more than they can the
way they look.  (Of course, we generally underestimate how
much people could affect these things if they really tried.)
Here I'm speaking of "class" as in social class, not as in
"she's a class act", or "she has class".

I am merely describing what I think is the best chance of
identifying a person's background or social class (lower,
middle, upper).  I have an anecdote or two you might find
interesting.

I once knew a family who always spoke as do middle-class
Americans, and did it so well that you'd never know that that
was not their origin. But one time I overheard them talking
among themselves when they didn't know anyone was around,
and I was dumfounded to hear sentences like "It don't matter
none what the cost is, them's the ones I want and them's the 
ones I'm gettin'. "

Oddly, their oldest son, who was a near-genius, had picked
up and internalized the speech he heard at school, and which
he heard his parents use on occasions when middle-class
people were present. This kid never spoke "ungrammatically",
never left off his 'g's on the ends of his "ing" words, yet
his younger brother *always* did!  His younger brother, still
quite a bright kid, had evidently not yet learned as his parents
had done, how to regulate his speech depending on who was
present.

I have lived in California almost all my life, and in northern
California it seemed to me that proles---i.e. lower class or
working class types---felt a social distance between them
and me. Upon visiting Arizona, I discovered that Arizona
proles give no sign of feeling any such social difference;
they treated me just like I was one of the guys. Now a
California prole might tell the same story the other way
around: he might relate that while California middles retain
a social distance, the Arizona middle-class types are regular
people   :-)

Now I would not have raised the above to the status of a
real conjecture except that a friend of mine who moved 
from California to Arizona---a rather shrewd observer 
himself who had been raised in an upper class family back
east---said the very same thing!  There was less social
distance in Arizona (and maybe in southern California?) 
between middles and proles.  For what it's worth.

Lee