Social Stratification Summary

Language and society work closely together in the establishment of the identity between two social classes. The social-class accents refer to the differences that may be observed in the social ranks. In this research, the two social classes that were subjected to the analysis are the Professionals and Non-professionals.

This observation may be seen in Labov’s (1966) “The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores”. In this study, Labov focuses on the usage of (r) in the speech of salespeople in the leading Department Stores of New York. He hypothesizes that “If any subgroups of New York City speakers are ranked in a scale of social stratification, then they will be ranked in the same order by their differential use of

Trudgill (2000, 21), “Social Stratification is a term used to refer to any hierarchical ordering of groups within a society especially in terms of power, wealth and status.” This Social Stratification leads to the observation of the different facets of language that may be influenced by social factors and social placements. Trudgill also discusses the possibility that this social stratification cannot be observed in all societies because of the varying degrees of social divisions. He discusses the social caste system in India as an example. The caste system in India is seen as a permanent division in their social realities. Because of this, the gaps between the population, in both social rank and other factors, are established. Trudgill comments that because of these divisions, the caste dialects are easier to observe and study because they are “relatively stable, clearly named groups, rigidly separated from each other, with hereditary membership and with little possibility of movement from one caste to

Schmidt explains that Contrastive Analysis have been problematic in previous studies because of its inability to analyse languages and yield precise results. Schmidt cites Tarone (1976, 366) and says “that while many papers have been written claiming to predict performance on the basis of contrastive analysis, few of these have presented systematically gathered and analysed data to validate the predictions made.” Schmidt’s study focuses on the effectiveness of the Contrastive Analysis and how it is to be applied in order to get a proper analysis. The study focused on the English speech of the native Egyptian Arabic speaker. According to Todaro (as cited by Schmidt in Ioup and Weinberger 1987, 366), “Teachers of English to native speakers of Egyptian Arabic are well aware of the fact that the majority of their students will have difficulties with English /ɵ/ and /ð̠/ and will often substitute /s/ and /z/,