{"id":56640,"date":"2013-08-11T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2013-08-11T17:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=56640"},"modified":"2013-08-11T13:11:55","modified_gmt":"2013-08-11T18:11:55","slug":"americans-brits-and-social-class-how-language-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/08\/11\/americans-brits-and-social-class-how-language-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"The Language of Class"},"content":{"rendered":"

In survey questions, the result you get might depend on the choices you offer.<\/p>\n

An article at The Atlantic<\/em> explains<\/a>\u00a0\u201cWhy Americans All Believe They\u2019re Middle Class.\u201d \u00a0But is<\/em> that what we all believe?\u00a0 The author, Anat Shenker-Osorio, started with from these figure from a September 2012 Pew report.
\n\"1\"<\/a>
\nOnly 8-9% of Americans put themselves in the lower or upper class.\u00a0 The other 91% say that they are \u201cmiddle class,\u201d some with a modifier (upper or lower), some without.\u00a0 Shenker-Osorio continues:<\/p>\n

Researching how people\u2019s unconscious assumptions affect their perception of economic issues, I explored the linguistic dynamics behind the term \u201cmiddle class,\u201d especially in comparison to other economic groupings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That would be fine, except that both she and Pew made one huge omission. \u00a0The Pew survey didn\u2019t include “working class” as an option.\u00a0 Out of sight, out of unconscious assumptions.<\/p>\n

Language and Surveys<\/strong><\/p>\n

How big an omission is this?\u00a0 Since 1972, the GSS has asked a similar question to tap \u201csubjective social class\u201d (i.e., what class people think they are regardless of their objective circumstances).\u00a0 But the GSS includes \u201cworking\u201d along with the upper, middle, and lower.<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Like the Pew survey, the GSS finds less than 10% putting themselves in the upper or lower class.\u00a0 But for the past forty years, the remaining nine-tenths of the population have been evenly split between \u201cworking\u201d and \u201cmiddle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shenker-Osorio\u2019s linguistic analysis runs into other data conflicts.\u00a0 It\u2019s not always easy to know what Americans mean by upper, lower, or middle class because:<\/p>\n

Americans are relatively skittish about mentioning class. Contrasting databases of text from U.S. and UK sources, we find that Brits use \u201cupper class\u201d and \u201clower class\u201d more readily; we prefer \u201cwealthy\u201d and \u201cpoor.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But another database, the books in Google nGrams, shows something much different.<\/p>\n

Contrasting Data<\/strong><\/p>\n

I constructed a ratio of American to British for the terms \u201cupper class\u201d and \u201clower class.\u201d\u00a0 A ratio of more than 100% means that the term appeared more frequently in American books.<\/p>\n

Ratio for “upper class”:<\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ratio for “lower class”:<\/p>\n

\"4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In general, since 1900, US and UK books used these terms at about the same frequency.\u00a0 But from 1955-1965, the US heard a crescendo in class talk.\u00a0 By 1965, US books mentioned the \u201clower class\u201d four times as often as did UK books.\u00a0 Since then class talk in the US declined as rapidly as it had increased. (For some reason, Shenker-Osorio was unaware of my\u00a0earlier post<\/a>\u00a0on these matters.)<\/p>\n

The real US-UK difference is in \u201cworking class,\u201d a term that Shenker-Osorio ignores. Since 1935, it has appeared less frequently in US books.\u00a0 For the last 30 years, British books have mentioned the working class twice as often.<\/p>\n

Ratio for “working class”:<\/p>\n

\"5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It may be that the databases Shenker-Osorio used are better than nGrams, and it\u2019s frustrating to find different sources of data pointing in different directions.\u00a0 More important, we still don\u2019t know what people mean when they say they are middle class.\u00a0 Shenker-Osorio sees it as a category of exclusion.\u00a0 The images we have of upper and lower are so extreme as to apply to almost nobody.<\/p>\n

Not finding popular depictions of wealth and poverty similar to our own lived experiences, we determine we must be whatever\u2019s left over.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

True perhaps, but it tells only what people think middle class is\u00a0not<\/i>. I\u2019m not familiar with the research on subjective social class, but it seems that we still don\u2019t know what people think \u201cmiddle class\u201d actually\u00a0is<\/i>.\u00a0 Nor do we know what they have in mind when they say they are working class.\u00a0 I have my own hunches, but I will leave them for a later post.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In survey questions, the result you get might depend on the choices you offer. An article at The Atlantic explains\u00a0\u201cWhy Americans All Believe They\u2019re Middle Class.\u201d \u00a0But is that what we all believe?\u00a0 The author, Anat Shenker-Osorio, started with from these figure from a September 2012 Pew report. Only 8-9% of Americans put themselves in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":56642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,23384,253,274,1811,3920,37],"class_list":["post-56640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-history","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-nation-britainthe-u-k","tag-nation-united-states","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/08\/12.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56640"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56743,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56640\/revisions\/56743"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}