Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of the Understandable English Podcast.
I'm Oliver and today we are going to be talking about the British Class System.
So what is a class system?
A class system is a phenomenon or something which occurs, separating different categories or groups of people within a society.
This can be the way people behave.
It can be based on their income, so how much money they earn and also other aspects of their life.
Often, these class systems come from time periods in history when there were clear separation between kings and the working people.
So there was the wealthy or very rich people, the people in the middle and perhaps the people who did a lot of the manual work.
So work in the fields or factories.
And in many cases in many different countries these class systems still to an extent exist today.
The UK is no exception and in fact it is one of the most divided countries, in many ways by class, in the world.
Of course, these categories and separations are not as important as they once used to be, but if you travel or live in the UK for a long time, you will start to notice some clear differences between groups of people within society.
We can simply categorize society into three main classes.
The working class, the middle class, and the upper class.
But there are much more complicated and specific ways to separate these groups as well.
But for simplicity and to explain today some of the differences, we are going to just use those three simple categories.
The upper class is seen as the richest, most wealthy and most comfortable people within the UK.
They might have a lot of money from their parents and their grandparents passed down through generations.
Often they do a variety of cultural activities like going to the theatre, ballet and lots of other things which in the past would have been associated with wealthy and rich people.
This group of people often own their own property in the vast majority of cases.
They might even have multiple houses.
They could be land owners, so they own their own land or other houses which they rent or allow people to live in for money.
The middle class can be categorized by people who have a high level of income, so they have financial security.
It means they aren't really worrying about money.
For the most part, these people also own their own houses or property, but a lot less than the upper class.
Often they won't be landlords or renting property to other people.
And finally, the working class is seen as people with the lowest level of income or salaries in the uk.
Often they will do jobs which require manual labor, for example working in a factory, but of course, as times have changed, this can be seen, as you know, basic office jobs um, or jobs which don't require a higher level of education.
Of course, there is a lot of in between with these categories.
That's just a simple explanation of what some of the differences might be.
But today, one of the things I would like to focus on and talk about is how language changes between these two groups.
And this is where the old British class system is still very clear even today in 2022.
It is clear from things such as accent, so how people speak.
People from higher classes tend to prefer certain signs when pronouncing words.
They have more of a specific accent.
And in the past this was often associated with RP accent renounced pronunciation or, as some people call it, the Queen's English.
It is the kind of accent that you might often hear on BBC News or in Parliament from, for example, a Prime Minister or members of Parliament MPs, politicians.
Like a lot of the wealth and the upper class in the UK, it is heavily concentrated or focused in the south of England, so the south east of England around London and the home counties.
These are the wealthiest, richest counties in the UK.
So today I wanted to look at a few common English words and show you the two differences.
So with many of these words there are often three different ways of saying them in English.
One option is preferred by the working class or middle class, and another is often preferred and used by the upper class.
But today we're going to look at two options for each word.
So the upper class and the non-upper class.
Because really the difference between working class and middle class is a lot more blurred or not clear anymore.
And the words used can move between the two.
But the upper class words are still very separate and different from what a lot of us use today.
So I'd like to tell you a few of them.
The most clear and common example is often non-upper class or non-rich people will say movie like in America.
And in the upper class, they tend to prefer the word film.
Of course, it can be used in both, but film tends to be used more in the upper class.
Another common word, which I'm sure you know, is the word toilet.
Toilet, a very common word in English.
In the upper class or the wealthiest areas of society.
They tend to use the word lavatory instead of toilet.
Another common word is dessert, so the food that you eat after the meal often sweet, like a cake or a bun or something nice and sweet.
In the upper class or the wealthiest areas, they tend to use the word pudding, pudding.
And the final example I'd like to give you today is a word you probably know quite well.
So living room or lounge.
This is the room in which you might watch TV, maybe entertain some guests and have a cup of tea.
In the wealthier or upper classes they tend to say sitting room or drawing room, drawing room and lounge or living room is not quite popular.
These are just a few small examples of language use and it gets even more complicated.
So when we get into the very elite class of British society, so the top 4 or 5 or even, by some studies, 6 of the richest, wealthiest people in the UK, they use an almost entirely different way of speaking, a lot of almost specific slang words which are almost not understandable to other native speakers outside of this group.
It can be very confusing and difficult to understand even for most of British society.
So all of this might sound a little bit strange to you, but don't worry.
In 2022, although it is still present and clear in many ways.
The class system and the divides in Britain are not as bad as they once were and it isn't as serious a distinction.
Of course, there are still many problems which come from the system and the history behind it and these social separations within the UK.
But the reality is we live in a time with more opportunities than ever.
People can get access and opportunities to education at an unprecedented rate, so a rate which they never seen before.
But as i always think we can move towards improving these divides, I think that separating people in terms of perspective and how you view them, based on the amount of money they have, what kind of family they came from, is bad.
Ultimately, it's bad and quite negative.
We should judge and look at each person for who they are, what they've done, what they do and their own personality and beliefs.
We should not judge them based on their family, their ethnicity, their skin color or any of these things.
So I hope this was interesting for you.
It's a little bit of a different podcast topic today, but something that I was thinking about recently when I was watching a lot of content about British politics and really looking at how different our politicians are from the average people, the average person in the UK.
Because in the UK our politicians are often seen as from this upper class, so the small minority of the population.
And the rest of the country is really not so similar to the politicians who are making our laws and really deciding the future of the country.
So I hope you have a fantastic day, whatever time of the day you're listening and wherever you are.
Have a wonderful day and I will see you in the next episode.
Goodbye.
