Social Class and Its Impact on Narrative Styles in Spoken Discourse

Abstract

This paper addresses the deep-seated effects of the social class in the structural and stylistic aspects of narrative that lie in the spontaneous speech discourse. It looks beyond conventional studies of accent and lexicon, exploring how socio-economic positioning determines the architecture of storytelling, such as how much a narrative is held together, how complex the syntax is, how much there are evaluative mechanisms, and how there are strategies of audience engagement. This study is based on the sociolinguistic approach to narrative analysis, which is used by William Labov and the idea of linguistic habitus, which was introduced by Pierre Bourdieu, wherein a qualitative method of analyzing personal experience stories is used, utilizing stories told by people of different classes. The results show that there are radical stylistic differences, specifically the narratives of the professional-middle-class speakers may be marked by metacognitive framing and preoccupation with the inner psychological situation, whereas the working-class narratives are characterized by the need to use linear sequence of events, the importance of group values, and dramatic performance as an evaluation method. These trends show that narrative style is not an innocent medium but a powerful indicator of social identity, actively constructed by and indicative of class-based practices, access to educational resources, and communicative expectations. The research finds that it is important to appreciate such subtle distinctions in order to tackle the problem of implicit bias in the institutional realms, such as education and law, where verbal expression is the most likely and where the difference in style might be perceived as incoherent and unsophisticated.

Keywords: Social Class, Impact, Narrative Styles, Spoken Discourse, Verbal Expression