Voice and Status

Photo: Markus Spiske / Unsplash

In Peter Coy’s essay, Whom Can Tell One’s Social Class Based on Grammar?, he argues that:

…education has become as important as money in determining class. It’s nice to have both, of course, but an Uber driver with a doctorate in anthropology might look down on the passenger who can’t pronounce the street he’s going to. (And the passenger might look down on the driver — social geometry is funny that way.)

One way to signal your level of education, and hence your class — short of going around in a sweatshirt from your alma mater — is simply to speak. That’s as true today in the United States as it was in 1912 in the United Kingdom, when George Bernard Shaw wrote in the preface to “Pygmalion” (which became “My Fair Lady” on Broadway), “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”

A study by researchers at Yale published three years ago found that listeners have a better-than-random chance of discerning whether someone has a college degree by listening to the person speak just seven words. Put simply, your tongue gives you away.

Fascinating as this subject is (to me, at any rate) it has implications for dialog in any fiction you are writing: if seven words are all it takes to nail a character’s social class, then you better get those seven words right!

We know this, of course. Voice and tone are critical to character construction and the vividness with which they appear in the reader’s mind. But it is certainly worth striking any “ain’t” or “gonna” from a high-status character’s speech, and maybe injecting the same into a low-status character's utterances. 

And, if that Yale study is correct, nailing the first few words is especially important since they are read, not spoken.

It reminds me of the hoary old adage: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Too true, old adage, too true…