https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolect

Basically, since class is culture, and cultures have language, a sociolect describes the language of a class, the ways you have to talk to perform that class.

And, naturally, this goes both ways. Someone talking the sociolect of a certain class is seen as performing that class, and therefore belonging to the class.

It should also be noted that the original article is itself a class performance! The author uses more complex words and grammar than necessary, thereby signalling academia or professional class. (Someone in the comments on that page wondered why this article had a more complex language compared to other articles by the same author, but didn't connect the dots...)

But even today, if people use the words of French origin rather than the old English words, one is regarded as being from the upper class, such as using 'purchase' instead of 'buy'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-context_cultur...

This features quite a bit in War and Peace, too. As tensions increase between France and Russia as Napoleon takes over much of Europe and war between the countries looms, you'll find Russian nobility taking Russian language classes, because their first language is French!

Such as pig/pork, beef/cow. The working classes spoke English and dealt with the live animals, the elites just ate them.

But I don't think this is well explained by a class distinction. I mean, the classes of people who raised sheep weren't so different from the people who raised chickens.

Pheasant: from Old French fesan. (the current french is faisan).

Upper class: valet [val-ett], fillet [fill-ett]. Middle class or lower: valet [val-ay], fillet [fill-ay].

Upper class: claret [clar-ett] (from French clairet). Middle class or lower: Bordeaux.

My dad is a tradesperson, and his influence is the one thing I have never been able to completely hide, even in professional settings. It's gotten me a bit of grief over the years, as my response to stress is often to start swearing like a builder.

On one hand, I like being able to code-switch easily. On the other hand, I feel like the only reason I can do it is because I had to, and the inability to completely mask my lower class upbringing has negatively impacted my opportunities at times.

At this point, I just try to own it. If I don't, it's just persisting the negative stereotypes of people of Maori descent never making something of themselves. Gotta start breaking those biases down somehow.

It's all just class. One can be just as intelligent with a Southern accent as one can be stupid with another.

Todd Barry has a great bit on this (language might be offensive to some) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfNnM2aYsWo

In my experience, there isn't a huge difference in the level of racial bigotry between northern and southern states. The difference lies primarily in the openness of it.

For example, the effects of deed-restricted home sales are still being felt today in many neighborhoods in northern states.

In some ways, the openness of the southern brand of racism is more respectable than the northern brand. While the southern real estate agent was open with you, the northern real estate agent may simply assume you don't want to live in a neighborhood that's "too black," never say so to your face, and proceed to only show you houses in the "nice" part of town.

Yes, it's a contrived example, but it's also something that happens every day all over the country.

When I was managing people in the '90s in California one of the technicians who worked for me was black and had worked all over the country.

He said he much preferred living in the South, because while there was no difference in the number of bigots he ran across, outside the South the bigots weren't brave enough to be open about it so it was harder to tell where he stood.

I think there's probably some legitimacy to that view, but I always wonder how much "shit happens" type stuff gets identified as racism. I'm white, so when a white guy is an asshole to me I assume he's an asshole. If I were black I might assume he's a racist.

Besides racism, that's also a way to say "too poor/downtrodden/crime ridden".

To which, they would indeed have a point (statistics wise), although that of course is caused by the systemic injustice and lack of opportunities against blacks for centuries.

Also notice how people still say the exact same thing about "white trash" places in the North (and South), and nobody seems to mind, because while the US got more tolerant about race, they still don't give a rats arse about classism and social exclusion based on being poor and not a "success".

There is a lot of bigotry in the Bay Area and online. Considering what we know about the mental shortcuts people use to process complex social information, evidence/science minded people should expect there to be bigotry as an unfortunate phenomenon to be aware of. Instead, it has received the imprimatur of "sin."

It's a thorny problem. Talk about bigotry in the "wrong" way, and you ironically open yourself up to yet more bigotry involving projections about your internal mental state.

I mean, sure, there are super racist areas in the south. I grew up and lived in mostly rural Alabama for the first 20+ years of my life, and there were some rural areas that were just as terrible as people imagine (cross burnings, open Klan meetings, etc, though that was starting to die down in the last 10 years or so I lived there).

That said, a lot of cities in the south are 30% - 50% black (sometimes more), and people who live in those cities, generally speaking, coexist and interact with many black and white people on a continual basis. It'd be kind of hard to do that and be super racists to the level people imagine the south to be.

Or maybe I am just bitter about a 70% white city talking about how racist a 53% black city must be.

A lot of tribes in the US have members that exhibit this same behavior. A respectful pause to consider a response and a slow cadence should be a sign they have considered their words, but instead is portrayed as stupid. It made going to DC and dealing with bureaucrats in the 90's a pain in the butt.

I'm really glad to hear that I'm not alone with this struggle. Still don't have a good answer for it though. :(

If I could participate in this career/industry from a smaller town, you bet your butt I'd do it in a second.

The people who ended up working remotely are the ones who worked in the office for many years and gained the trust of their employer. Then when the family moved (usually due to a spouse changing jobs) the employer decided to let them work remotely rather than letting them go, at least in the near term.

Well yes pretty much this. I worked for a year on-premises before switching to remote, and I can imagine it's harder to find remote work from the get-go.

My father was a school board administrator. He was able to make good money, work in an office with colleagues, and still had the ability to live in practically every town in the US. School boards are everywhere. Tech companies are only in the largest cities.

It's really frustrating.

Fox News Network, LLC 1211 Avenue Of The Americas New York, NY 10036

The question was whether there's a network "showing what's important to the middle states".

(Which I interpret as "important related to their views on laws, life, politics, ethics, etc", not as "related to regional news").

As much as I like rural folks and like to spend time with them (and despise folks who look down on them), the farmer is just as reliant on the financiers who ensure a steady cash flow for the multinational which delivers him his fertiliser, his fuel, the parts for his tractor, his clothes, his food &c. &c. &c.

We're all interconnected.

But do you think your medicine, qualified doctors, medical equipment, internet, computers you use, movies and tv series you watch, trucks you drive and tons of other things besides grow on trees?

(Not to mention farming subsidies)

Not many medicine schools, pharma corps, research labs, car manufactures, tech companies, tv and movie studios, etc operating out of rural Idaho, or South Dakota, or Alabama, or what have you...

If the opposite happened, urban areas would buy their food somewhere else and eventually save some money thanks to the increased competition in the market and the lack of agricultural subsidies, not to mention all the other ways we subsidize rural America's inefficiencies.

I grew up in the city and spent summers on my uncle's farm and have seen both sides. Gods, I am tired of this fucking stupid rural vs urban debate. They need each other, and can't exist in a modern world without each other. Move to the countryside and I hear stereotypes about how shit the people in the city are. Move back to the city and hear stereotypes about how shit the people in the country are. Both sets of stereotypes are largely wrong. Likewise, the people whose jobs straddle both urban and rural environments are not the people who use these stereotypes.

I've found that it's the keywords that indicate where people are from within the Midwest:

Is it soda or pop? Is it car-mel or care-uh-mel?

(I do linguistic stuff in my day job.)

To my ear, the Chicago accent is represented but exaggerated in the "Bill Swerski's Superfans" sketches from SNL in the 1990s - "Da bearssss".

And it's "cur-muhl". :)

Not saying one group is smarter/dumber, just that the difference in values makes it hard to come to an agreement, which can make the "other" side seem stupid / "full of shit" / nuts.

It's only reasonable to recognize and acknowledge that the South as a whole acts somewhat differently. But it's wrong to talk about all Southerners as if they're the same, or treat all Southerners badly because of it.

It's just like with race. There are real, factual differences between racial groups, and acknowledging this is not a bad thing. What's bad is judging or biasing your interaction with people from those racial groups because of it.

I'd wish people would get that, and only complain when a generalization is statistically wrong (e.g. doesn't really hold for the majority of the people it lumps along), instead of everytime they find a counter-example...

Are the people in California traditionalist, religious, backwards, or even racist, etc, as the people in Georgia? They might not be, regardless of who they chose to vote for -- which takes into account many factors and policies.

That said, California is also traditionally regarded as conservative (at least by us in Europe) -- it's places like Massachusetts or Vermont that we'd count as progressive. Especially since California is regarded as hardcore pro-money/big-business, which is large part of being a "conservative" here.

Atlanta is not all that different from LA and Boston politically.

Saying the entire south in aggregate is "stupider" because of that is plain wrong.

http://www.electproject.org/2012g

2) I also meant to highlight "some do, some don't" by saying "perhaps 51%". Perhaps 51% is even too high, maybe it's just a vocal minority.

3) By calling them (in quotes) "those people" and "other" I was alluding to a certain amount of xenophobia on the part of coastal dwellers when considering fly-over dwellers. And yes, that cuts both ways.

Educational outcomes are far worse in the South. Teachers make less, schools are funded more poorly, especially for poor folk.

I bet half of those people left the South and are fronting about it.

On the flip side, there is some evolutionary reasons why humans make quick decision when encountering new people or places, and I would guess it would take generations to change our hardwiring to NOT make those assumptions unconsciously. Even more brutal, if that hardwiring changes, there are circumstances where we'd likely be in trouble but for our split second assumptions.

Fascinating story on NPR last year about a cop in an evacuated Wal-mart looking for an active shooter. Came around the corner to see a white woman and for half a second wondered why a civilian was still in the store. Then she shot at him, he returned fire and barely escaped with his life. So there's arguments to be made for learning how to avoid those assumptions too :) Crazy, mixed up world we humans make for ourselves.

That you would make such a comment in a discussion about classism and racism is very ironic.

No supporting evidence has been presented that a person will necessarily attribute the same level of certainty when positively or negatively associating a person to a category, either globally or under specific circumstances that match these. Identifying someone as a threat and discounting someone as not a threat may engage different levels of reasoning and heuristics in different circumstances, and assuming they are equivalent without justification is a mistake, in my opinion.

> Why is the cop an allowable surrogate of societal stereotypes when he assumes the white woman is not the shooter, but an "individual that makes his own decisions, and has his own opinions, views and predispositions" when an alternative hypothetical is presented?

His behavior with regard to race was classified based purely on his profession. I'm not sure how that's justifiable.

Edit: To more directly address what I think your point is, we were presented a situation, not necessarily the police officer's reasoning and perspective. We don't know if the reason he thought she was not the shooter was her color, gender, clothing, bearing or some combination of those and other factors. There is little information to go on, so we shouldn't assume we know much.

I present this not as an argumentative reply to you, but just to clarify my point in my immediately preceding comment in this thread, as it seems to have been polarizing (it fluctuated from -2 to +3 multiple times, and now sits at 0).

> white people ... committed some 64% of the shootings ... Black people committed close to 16% ... Asians were responsible for around 9% ... Latinos are almost nowhere to be seen

> whites and blacks are pretty proportionate to their population

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/27/us/mass-shootings/index.ht...

You shouldn't have to be ashamed of how you sound or where you're from. I do massively agree with you regarding people thinking southerners are stupid bigots. The way to fix that is to show them you're not, and make a strong point of showing it.

It reminds me of a trip I recently took to Belfast. The day I was there, a car bomb from the IRA killed a police officer. A cabbie asked me if I supported Donald Trump and told he we was surprised I didn't. He told me all Americans supported Trump. So I asked him if he was an IRA thug/terrorist, to which he naturally said no. So rhetorically, I asked how he was from northern ireland and not IRA. When he explained what was obvious, I said EXACTLY, this is much like people who support trump in America. The vocal minority often drown out the majority. Blindly categorizing someone in $group is bigotry plain and simple. Just because it comes from an educated person in tech doesn't make it any less so. Perhaps point out this hypocrisy.

It's hardly reasonable to compare being a member of a terrorist organization to supporting the leading candidate of one of two major parties.

Consider just the sheer effort of participating in terrorism is far greater than voting.

SEJeff obviously isn't saying that Trump support and IRA support are exactly equivalent. He's saying they're both subgroups in a larger population that outsiders stereotype as representing the entire population, to the disgust of many of the people stereotyped. It's an excellent analogy because it references a situation that's intimately familiar to the person he's speaking to.

38.6% of Americans state that they would vote for Donald Trump over Hilary Clinton while 49% state that they would vote for Clinton over Trump.

There are only several hundred members of the IRA today (out of 1.8 million people in Northern Ireland) and even fewer of them participate in terrorism.

And it's not a logical fallacy. The cab driver clearly didn't mean all Americans support Donald Trump. Presumably he knows there are other candidates so thats at least a few people who don't support Trump. He meant a lot of Americans do support Trump and clearly they do.

[1] http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/ge...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Irish_Republican_Army

Why are you willing to accept that the cab driver was speaking figuratively, but not that SEJeff was?

Then why was he surprised to meet an American who didn't? You're really reaching.

I've had instances where if I reveal my technical experience with the usual way I speak about such things - I get cold/rude service. This happened at one of those AT&T storefronts, Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, and at more than a few Apple Stores. I don't try to be intimidating, but I do want to inform the person "helping" me if I can...

I've gotten into the habit of adopting a slower speech with a slight drawl in an effort to appear more relatable and honest about my intentions. It takes some patience as I have to describe my problem 'in a circle' and without a larger vocabulary. However, I don't get treated like sheltered upper-class and people seem to want to help me rather than avoid me.

I've also avoid sounding like the stereotypical homosexual. Just the "accent" makes some people freak out and say I'm 'shoving it in their face'. I'm looking at you Aunt Marlene. I reserve the lisp for Vegas and Chippendales.

Just something to think about...

In my limited experience working with others, southern accent = ignorant bigot has not been something I have seen with my co workers. People usually just shrug it off but I can see why a country accent may be looked down upon by ignorant people.

What part of the country do you work in?

Ha ha amazingly I can detect a southern accent even in your writing! ('different' when someone not from the south would say 'differently')

Language is amazing isn't it.

I know, because in high school I became friends with a highly educated family who moved into town after having lived all over the world, and made an effort to match their more intelligent sounding speech (which included, among other things, adding -ly to adverbs.)

My mom still occasionally teases me that I say "eye-ther" instead of "eee-ther" (for "either.")

Most elite Northerner whites are just as insulated as they think Southerners are, when it comes to traveling within their own country. In fact they typically know jack shit about Southern culture. There was a time when Southern accents were considered deliberately slow, enunciated, cultured. Yes, at that time whites were at the top of the class food chain, and yes most of that white privilege was racist or at least depended on it. But the accent is orthogonal to racism. We've just come to associate one with the other, using a stereotype.

Another stereotype is white Northerners will pretty much assume white Southerners, identified as such by their drawl, may be a racist.

Assumptions are traps.

Most people out here can comprehend the concept that there are people in our country who conservative, religious, and smart. They'd shit themselves if they met someone who was conservative and smarter than they were. (This is where you insert a joke about if they're so smart then why are they conservative! hardy har har.)

I grew up in Seattle and still live there. If you voice any opinions that are not in a narrow band of the far left wing, they (including recent transplants) will attribute you holding that opinion to your place of origin, rather than listening to any justification you have for holding that opinion.

Along some axes Seattle is very diverse. But along others not so much.

While I agree this is not ideal, it's also built into human nature to use any/all hints to help generalize/categorize (likely because it determined survival in the past).

I grew up in the South (though not rural or Appalachia) and at age 10, I made the conscientious decision to get rid of my southern accent. It sounded "unintelligent" to me but more than that, it seemed to bely my moral values. As judgmental as this sounds (and it's true, it is judgmental), I looked around at the values that are often attached to the South -- bigotry and racism being the big two -- and said, "no."

So, at age 10, I lost my accent. I first stopped saying "y'all" -- but it quickly morphed into my entire accent changing. My parents/sister and most of my friends still had an accent, but I lost mine. With the exception of a few words or phrases, I don't even say southern colloquialisms. (I do still call every type of soda "Coke" -- but that's just Atlanta pride).

When I take those tests that determine dialect, I never get the South, I almost always get midwest or Southern California. (That was the goal, so go me?) Even drunk, I don't slip back to a southern accent, simply because it doesn't exist as part of me anymore.

The fact that I made that decision at age 10 -- and to be VERY clear, it was my own decision and not one pushed/encouraged by my parents (in fact, they probably rolled their eyes) -- I think says a lot about just how palpable those stereotypes that you mention are. Because at that age, when given the opportunity to lose an accent (I had speech impediment, was taking speech therapy a few times a week and had to basically re-train myself to talk. I decided to hack the system and get the accent I wanted in the process), I took it. I'll be totally honest, I don't regret it.

But still, I do often think about the code switching that I chose to take on at that age and what that means. For my career now, which often includes going on television -- it's realistically probably served me well to have no accent. Even in high school working in retail, it often served me well to "not sound like I was from the South" when selling someone a $1500 digital video camera or charging $50 an hour to repair a computer.

Still, I do think about it a lot. I think about why it was so important, even at that age, for me to reject something like my voice/accent.

My husband (a software engineer) is a lot like you in that he is able to switch his accent on and off depending on who he talks to. When speaking with his parents or grandmother, his Tennessee twang comes out. With colleagues or people in our neighborhood, there is a slight hint of an accent, but nothing major. And he does it for the same reasons.

No one wants to sound like a redneck in a professional setting, especially one stereotypically white-collar like software engineering. And yet, we don't talk about why that is the case -- or why where we are from matters.

English and Scottish sayings/slang are my favorite. Southerns have some good sayings but they are not as enjoyable for me to hear, maybe because I used to them.

Indeed when I was growing up even though I was in a rural area people who lived on farms had a noticeably different accent from those of us who lived in coastal fishing villages even though the farms might only be a kilometer or so from the coast.

e.g.

“A ken a ken im, but a da ken far a ken im fae.”

or

"I know I know him, but I don't know where I know him from".

And of course, I was a "wee loonie" when I was younger.

Edit: Of course, the biggest crime I commit when it comes to class is, of course, using "toilet" rather than "loo".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avp9aUkM5g0

On the other hand, I find it almost impossible to read text that is supposed to show Scottish accent, like the one from arethuza.

I've probably said something like that many times when I was younger (I now have, as someone described it, an "affected Edinburgh accent"). However, you can get silly Scots phrases like:

"Fit fit fits fit fit?"

Or, my favourite:

"Aye, ane an an ingin ane an a"

The latter I can't say without almost singing (and smiling).