Stratification in Britain

Stratification - is arrangement in strata and the position of different strata in relation to one another. Stratum (pl. strata) – is a level of people in society; social class or division.

British society is considered to be divided into 3 main groups of classes – the upper class or aristocracy, the middle class and the lower or working class. This is known as the class system and it is important to know something about it if you want to understand British people and society.

British people grow up with a deep knowledge and understanding of the class system even if they are not very conscious of it. Most people know which class they belong to and are able to tell which class another person comes from by the way they speak, their clothes, interests or even the type of food they eat.

Social class is not only about behaviour or attitudes. For example, although many upper class people are rich and may own a lot of land, having a lot of money does not make a person upper class. It is also important to come from a particular kind of family, have friends who are considered suitable, have been to a certain type of private school and speak with a right kind of accent. There are people who are poor but who do not think of themselves as working class because their family background, education, political opinions, etc. are different to those of most working-class people.

Many people do not like the class system but it is impossible to pretend that these differences do not exist or that British people do not sometimes form opinions in this way.

Many kinds of food, activities and aspects of lifestyle are associated with one particular class. These are often referred to, e.g. in jokes and stories, in order to convey information about a person’s social class. For example, if a man is described as enjoying a few beers and a game of darts in the pub on a Saturday night, British speaker would guess that the man is working class.

Even more indicative than what the speaker says is the way that he or she says it. The English grammar and vocabulary which is used in public speaking, radio and television news broadcasts, books and newspapers is known as “standard British English”. Most working-class people, however, use lots of words and grammatical forms in their everyday speech which are regarded as “non-standard”. Nevertheless, nearly everybody in the country is capable of using standard English when they judge that the situation demands it. They are taught to do it at school. Therefore, the clearest indication of a person’s class is often his or her accent. Most people cannot change this convincingly to suit the situation. The most prestigious accent in Britain is known as “Received Pronunciation” (RP). It is the combination of standard English spoken with an RP accent that is usually meant when people talk about “BBC English” or “Oxford English” or “the Queen’s English”.

Look at the stereotyped representation of the three classes (upper, middle and working from left to right) as seen in a satirical TV programme “Frost over England” in 1967. This view is now quite a long way from the reality, but still lives on in people’s minds.