Speech and Social Status in America

Abstract

The importance of one's speech' as an indicator of social status has received little attention' in America. Several writers of books on social stratification have even suggested that' the speech differences between members of upper and'lower classes are very subtle and inconsequential. This article presents research evidence to the contrary, based primarily on* three research projects conducted by the present author and two by other researchers. The findings suggest that persons' social status is revealed by their voice-even when content-free speech is used, e.g., counting from one to 20. Persons speaking one regional dialect of American English can identify the social status of persons speaking different dialects. The research also attempts to isolate the various speech qualities which reveal one's social status and to investigate the ability of speakers to disguise these qualities. Language has long been recognized as a symbolic indicator of social class. Barber' points out in his text, Social Stratification, that in India the ability to use written language, i.e., to read and write, had long been a symbol of Brahman caste membership. In nineteenth-century Russia, the upper classes spoke French, the language of the court, in preference to their native language which they shared with the lower classes. In modern European countries the speech patterns of thie different classes are often so gross as to be considered different dialects. The middleand upper-class Germans are expected to speak Hoch Deutsch or high German. But it is *This research was done while Professor Ellis was a research assistant in the Communications Research Center at Purdue University. It was conducted under the guidance of Dr. W. Charles Redding and with the financial support of a National Science Foundation grant to the Communications Research Center. 1 Bernard Barber, Social Stratification (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1957), p. 151. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 06:24:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms