Sociolinguistic difference leading to the breakup of Prince William and his girlfriend?
Sarah Lyall from "The New York Times" wrote -
Thanks so much for your time just now. As I mentioned, I'm working on an article for The New York Times about the issue of class and language in Britain. The article takes as its starting point the breakup of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and the charges that his friends looked down on her for saying things like "toilet" and "I beg your pardon." I'm wondering if any of these old class distinction still stand -- is word usage still a class indicator in Britain? Do people care if they use the word "toilet" now?
Here is my reply -
Dear Sarah,
Thanks for the interesting topic.
While social stratification may take forms that vary from society to society, it is quite straightforward in Britain. Unlike the U.S.A., where race and ethnicity are important social differences, social class is the most salient form of social stratification in Britain. Argyle (1994:3) and Macaulay (2005:36) show that there is a British class system in which most people are clearly aware where they belong [see Xiao and Tao 2007 below for the references to the citations]. I am told that in my daughter's school, children from the middle class do not mix up with those from the working class, and children can tell, from how they are dressed, which classes their classmates come from!
We have demonstrated that different classes use language differently in terms of swearing (see McEnery and Xiao 2004, section 3.6) and amplifiers (see Xiao and Tao 2007, section 6). However, in the case of "toilet" vs. "lavatory", the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC) shows that their difference is a basically spoken vs. written distinction rather than one related to social classes. The word "toilet" (including its plural form) appears in spoken BNC 51.54 times per million words in comparison with 17.15 times per million words in the written BNC. There are 8.12 instances of the word "lavatory" (including its plural form) per million words in the written BNC in relation to 1.84 instances per million words in the spoken BNC. In terms of social class, the upper middle class AB (see Xiao and Tao 2007 section 6 for an explanation) is actually the most frequent user of "toilet" (AB: 107.21, C1 93.96, DE 93.64, and C1 67.1 instances per million words) - for "lavatory", the frequencies are too low to produce any reliable results. Quite surprisingly, the upper middle class AB is also the most frequent user of the more informal expression "the loo": AB 29.57, C2 13.98, C1 9.01, and DE 6.69 instances per million words. For "(I) beg your pardon", it is again very surprising that AB is the most frequent user: AB 24.64, C1 16.73, DE 8.92 and C2 4.19 instances per million words.
The linguistic behaviour for the breakup might be just an excuse, or the sociolinguistic pattern has changed over the past two decades (the BNC sampled spoken data between the late 1980s and the early 1990s), or the royal family is sociolinguistically distinctive from the upper (middle) class in our data.
References:
McEnery, A. and Xiao, Z. (2004) "Swearing in modern British English: The case of fuck in the BNC". Language and Literature 13/3: 235-68. Available at http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/52/01/swearing_paper.pdf
Xiao, Z. and Tao, H. (2007) "A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of amplifiers in British English". Sociolinguistic Studies 1/2. http://www.corpus4u.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=341&d=1211788767
Hope you find the above of help.
Best regards,
Richard
Sarah Lyall from "The New York Times" wrote -
Thanks so much for your time just now. As I mentioned, I'm working on an article for The New York Times about the issue of class and language in Britain. The article takes as its starting point the breakup of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and the charges that his friends looked down on her for saying things like "toilet" and "I beg your pardon." I'm wondering if any of these old class distinction still stand -- is word usage still a class indicator in Britain? Do people care if they use the word "toilet" now?
Here is my reply -
Dear Sarah,
Thanks for the interesting topic.
While social stratification may take forms that vary from society to society, it is quite straightforward in Britain. Unlike the U.S.A., where race and ethnicity are important social differences, social class is the most salient form of social stratification in Britain. Argyle (1994:3) and Macaulay (2005:36) show that there is a British class system in which most people are clearly aware where they belong [see Xiao and Tao 2007 below for the references to the citations]. I am told that in my daughter's school, children from the middle class do not mix up with those from the working class, and children can tell, from how they are dressed, which classes their classmates come from!
We have demonstrated that different classes use language differently in terms of swearing (see McEnery and Xiao 2004, section 3.6) and amplifiers (see Xiao and Tao 2007, section 6). However, in the case of "toilet" vs. "lavatory", the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC) shows that their difference is a basically spoken vs. written distinction rather than one related to social classes. The word "toilet" (including its plural form) appears in spoken BNC 51.54 times per million words in comparison with 17.15 times per million words in the written BNC. There are 8.12 instances of the word "lavatory" (including its plural form) per million words in the written BNC in relation to 1.84 instances per million words in the spoken BNC. In terms of social class, the upper middle class AB (see Xiao and Tao 2007 section 6 for an explanation) is actually the most frequent user of "toilet" (AB: 107.21, C1 93.96, DE 93.64, and C1 67.1 instances per million words) - for "lavatory", the frequencies are too low to produce any reliable results. Quite surprisingly, the upper middle class AB is also the most frequent user of the more informal expression "the loo": AB 29.57, C2 13.98, C1 9.01, and DE 6.69 instances per million words. For "(I) beg your pardon", it is again very surprising that AB is the most frequent user: AB 24.64, C1 16.73, DE 8.92 and C2 4.19 instances per million words.
The linguistic behaviour for the breakup might be just an excuse, or the sociolinguistic pattern has changed over the past two decades (the BNC sampled spoken data between the late 1980s and the early 1990s), or the royal family is sociolinguistically distinctive from the upper (middle) class in our data.
References:
McEnery, A. and Xiao, Z. (2004) "Swearing in modern British English: The case of fuck in the BNC". Language and Literature 13/3: 235-68. Available at http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/52/01/swearing_paper.pdf
Xiao, Z. and Tao, H. (2007) "A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of amplifiers in British English". Sociolinguistic Studies 1/2. http://www.corpus4u.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=341&d=1211788767
Hope you find the above of help.
Best regards,
Richard