The English Oracle

Can your use of Latin-derived words indicate your social class?

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Music by Eric Matyas
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Track title: Hypnotic Orient Looping

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Chapters
00:00 Can Your Use Of Latin-Derived Words Indicate Your Social Class?
01:42 Answer 1 Score 1
02:08 Accepted Answer Score 3
03:15 Thank you

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Full question
https://english.stackexchange.com/questi...

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Tags
#britishenglish #latin #classbasedusage

#avk47



ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 3


LEXICAL BAR - A term coined by linguist David Corson in the 1980s. "In English-speaking societies coincidences of social and linguistic history have combined to create a lexical situation that is unique among languages: most of the specialist and high status terminology of English is Greco-Latin in origin and most of the less abrstract terminology is Anglo-Saxon in origin. English in this respect, relative to other languages, has a fairly clear boundary drawn between its everyday and its high status vocabularies." ............. "The bar is partly a function of the historically introduced and social class-based orderings of society that are associated with the division of labour: it separates the lexes of the members of conservative peripheral social groups from the dominant and high status léxicon of the language."
The author goes on to offer examples of the diferences in the linguistic style of young people on opposite sides of the bar: "I dunno, there's times when I think there are a few laws I'd like to stop but....don't know any I'd like to bring in." (London, poorer working-class 15-year-old) and "I don't think I'd introduce many new ones but I would abolish quite a few. (London, upper middle-class 15-year-old) References: 1. Corson, D., The Lexical Bar, Pergamon Press, 1985.




ANSWER 2

Score 1


This isn't a real answer to your question, but...

Generally, words coming from French often retain a higher register than words of Anglo-Saxon origin, and are considered by some to be more elaborate, sophisticated, or pretentious. Wikipedia

For those who are still curious, check out the fascinating (7 hour) documentary: The Adventure of English