Upper-class English in natural and audiovisual dialogue

This Ph.D. thesis deals with the language of the British upper class in natural face-to-face dialogue and how this language is rendered fictionally in audiovisuals. In this research, the definition of ‘upper class’ is used to refer to the British aristocracy, also defined in more modern terms as the élite group, which is distinguished by the other social classes by comparatively higher rates of cultural, social and economic capitals. This topic was chosen because, while the so-called ‘working classes’ in Britain have traditionally received more attention from scholars, the upper class has rarely been the subject of particularised studies, probably because it is a smaller social group, which is characterised by a concrete difficulty of penetration for investigation purposes. Moreover, the élite sociolect has traditionally been identified with the standard language, and has consequently been excluded from sociolinguistic studies. One of the main objectives of this thesis is that of providing a complete linguistic overview of the language of the British upper class by demonstrating that standard language and upper-class language should not be assumed to be identical. This thesis will be mostly descriptive, with the aim of reorganising the sparse information on the topic that is found in previous linguistic and sociocultural studies; these bibliographical contents will be discussed and expanded in the light of new evidence gathered from the qualitative analysis of some recorded audiovisual texts, building on the principles of Conversation Analysis and Sociophonetics. The use of computer-assisted tools will also be part of the process of the analysis. The research method adopted for this thesis can thus be considered as an empirical archival method, whose three major steps were the location, the inspection and the interpretation of the documentary sources. In particular, after two chapters dedicated to the linguistic description, the diachronic evolution and the present-day internal variability of the upper-class sociolect, the second part of the thesis will deal with the analysis of the case studies: chapter 3 will explore the main aspects of the spontaneous aristocratic language of Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Family and a few other influential upper-class figures in British society, while chapter 4 will be devoted to the upper-class character in cinema and TV and to the linguistic analysis of some conversational scenes in the Netflix TV series The Crown (2016-present); a final chapter will close the discussion by focusing on the comparison between real and represented upper-class English through the analysis of a few public speeches by the Queen and other aristocratic figures and how these speeches were rendered in The Crown. The results from this study, which combines the disciplines of sociolinguistics and dialectology applied to the audiovisual text, will hopefully open a new path in the study of the language of the élite group, which can still be considered as an under-researched topic in academia.