Chaoyang Zhang
One millionaire couple who had suddenly risen to a higher economic status but have not gained social acceptance of others in that class were attending a banquet. During the socializing, the wife was asked if she knew Beethoven. “Of course! I know him. I was with him on the bus route 9 to the beach yesterday.” When they got back home that night, the husband told the wife that she embarrassed him and she shouldn’t have spoken that much. As the wife wondered why, the husband replied:” Everyone knows the route 9 doesn’t go to the beach!”
Parvenus of any country or region that are previously associated with long-term lower working class seem to grab others’ attention in a dramatic way, especially when they have to make direct contact with those who have gained steady position in the upper class. The dramatic way here is not necessarily humorous. Basil Bernstein argued in his work (1961, 1972) that upper-class and lower working class communities are so different from each other that their language varieties help their speakers construct different views of the world. The former tends to practice what Bernstein called elaborated code, which involves accurate (standard) syntax, complex sentences, a wide range of adverbs and adjectives and qualifying language. The latter is associated with restricted code, which features poor (non-standard) grammatical constructions that are short and simple.
Social groups are given different values in our society. This process of assigning unequal value is called social stratification, where the upper class usually represent power and desired characteristics and lower class shares the opposite. Because of the nature of these features and the norms of the society, this leads the lower class to feel inferior and the upper class to feel superior. Therefore, prejudice, discrimination and oppression take place. Just as all people have prejudice, all people discriminate (Ozlem Sensoy 2002). While we can’t avoid prejudice, we can work to recognize our prejudices and gain new information and ways of thinking that will inform more just actions.
- Have you ever felt that your interlocutor lost interest continuing talking to you because of your ways of constructing language?
- Have you ever lost interest in continuing talking to your interlocutor because of her/his ways of constructing language?
- If you have experienced any (or both) of the above situation(s), how did you feel?
