Language and Social Class

Abstract

tT HAS BEEN suggested in earlier papers that associated with the | organization of particular social groups are distinct forms of spoken lanXguage.l Linguistic differences, other than dialect, occur in the normal social environment and status groups may be distinguished by their forms of speech. This diffierence is most marked where the gap between the socioeconomic levels is very great. There have been many studies of children aimed at measuring this diffierence. It is suggested that the measurable interstatus diffierences in language facility result from entirely different modes of speech found within the middle-class and the lower working-class. It is proposed that the two distinct forms of language use arise because the organization of the two social strata is such that diffierent emphases are placed on language potential. Once this emphasis or stress is placed, then the resulting forms of language use progressively orient the speakers to distinct and different types of relationships to objects and persons, irrespective of the level of measured intelligence. The role intelligence plays is to enable the speaker to exploit more successfully the possibilities symbolized by the socially determined forms of language use. There are exceptions to this linguistic determinism which arise under special limiting physiological and psychological conditioIts. It is suggested that the typical, dominant speech mode of the middle-class is one where speech becomes an object of special perceptual activity and a 'theoretical attitude' is developed towards the structural possibilities of sentence organization. This speech mode facilitates the verbal elaboration of subjective intent, sensitivity to the implications of separateness and diffierence, and points to the possibilities inherent in a complex conceptual hierarchy for the organization of experience. It is further suggested that this is not the case for members of the lower working-class. The latter are limited to a form of language use, which, although allowing for a vast range of possibilities, provides a speech form which discourages the speaker from verbally elaborating subjective intent and progressively orients the user to descriptive, rather than abstract, concepts. A study was designed to show that the two speech modes are related to diSerent statlus groups and, more importantly, to show that the orientation of the two linguistic structures is independent of non-verbal intelligence test scores. It was predicted for the working-class group that the langllage scores would be severely depressed in relation to the scores in the higher ranges of a non-verbal measure of intelligence. The design of the study was as follows. Two extreme social groups were