History Main / RichLanguagePoorLanguage

* In ''Film/{{Snowpiercer}}'', Minister Mason's heavy Yorkshire accent betrays her origins as a tail-dweller who managed to get promoted up-train; nearly everyone else up-train seems to have American or RP accents.

** Then you have people like Senator John Kenedy of Louisiana. Educated at Vanderbilt, University of Virginia Law School, and Magdalen College, Oxford, he speaks in a very pronounced folksy backwoods Southern accent, suiting his image as a "man of the people" conservative. Videos from earlier in his career, when he was a liberal Democrat, sbow him speaking with a standard upper-class accent.

* Invoked in the 12th season episode of WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons "A Tale of Two Springfields". Springfield is divided into two separate area codes by the phone company, with the upper class side of town keeping their existing area code and the city's more blue collar region being changed to the new one. Homer leads the half of Springfield with the new area code in seceding to form the town of New Springfield and the class divide between the two towns is soon established:

** At one time, an even higher-payload snob signifier was the British-influenced "Mid-Atlantic" accent made famous by the likes of Creator/KatharineHepburn, Creator/WilliamFBuckleyJr, George Plimpton, and [[Creator/MarxBrothers Margaret Dumont]]. This was an entirely artificial accent taught in prep schools; in the words of the professor and actor Dudley Knight, "its earliest advocates bragged that its chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so." The decline of the OldMoney WhiteAngloSaxonProtestant establishment after UsefulNotes/WorldWarII took the accent with it, even among the rich.

* Creator/TomScott, whose background is in linguistics, discusses this difference, at least in English, in his linguistics video [[https://youtu.be/wA2xRVMOThc "Why You Swear in Anglo-Saxon and Order Fancy Food in French: Registers"]].

--->'''Kent Brockman (On a TV Broadcast):''' As expected, New Springfield's bold experiment with slob rule is a disaster.\\

'''Homer [shakes fist]:''' Oh yeah?

'''Arthur''': '''Posh'' Welsh. They sound like us.

** Nationally, the most common upper-class accent is the Prep accent associated with New York City, particularly among socialites and the financial class. Almost any regional American accent can be pitched as the lower-class counterpart to this. Newscasters favor "neutral," Upper Midwest-style accents.
** At one time, an even higher-payload snob signifier was the British-influenced "Mid-Atlantic" accent made famous by the likes of Creator/KatharineHepburn, Creator/WilliamFBuckleyJr, George Plimpton, and [[Creator/MarxBrothers Margaret Dumont]].

** Given the prominence of racial issues in the U.S., the "lower class" accents are particularly associated with people of color, especially African-Americans, Hispanic people, and recent immigrants, as well as the accents of poor white Southerners and rural whites.

** Upper-class characters speak with [[AhPea Received Pronunciation]] or a UsefulNotes/HomeCounties accent. Working-class characters speak with Cockney accents, or with increasingly rougher accents the farther away they grew up from London and its environs.
** In Scotland, upper-class characters will probably sound the same as upper-class English (with perhaps a slight lilt), but sometimes have Morningside (Edinburgh) or Kelvinside (Glasgow) accents (although these are often coded as "social climber, doesn't really talk like that"). What most people think of as a Glaswegian accent is definitely working class, while a rural West Highland accent almost certainly marks you as a crofter whose family have been farming this land for generations.

** Zigzagged in the Israeli version, Gvirti HaNava. The sound Higgins teaches Eliza to make properly is a uvular r, which is used in two contexts: on stage and by Israelis whose native language is Arabic and whose speech is considered low-class. A possibly apocryphal story has a child at the theatre, hearing Eliza finally get the sound --"Yarad barad bidrom Sfarad ba'arev" [Ha]il fell in the south of Spain in the evening--asking why Eliza is speaking like a cleaning lady.

** Given the prominence of racial issues in the U.S., the "lower class" accents are particularly associated with people of color, especially African-Americans, Hispanic people, and recent Asian immigrants, as well as the accents of poor white Southerners and rural whites.

** Given the prominence of racial issues in the U.S., the "lower class" accents are particularly associated with people of color, especially African-Americans and Hispanic people, as well as the accents of poor white Southerners and rural whites.

** Given the prominence of racial issues in the U.S., the "lower class" accents are particularly associated with people of color, especially African-Americans and Hispanic people, as well as the accents of poor white southerners and rural whites.

** Regarding the first item, in some epochs there has been a strong migration from the southern to the northern regions.
At present, the demographic trend is changing (due to increased immigration from abroad).

** Moreover, in the Commedia dell'arte, servants as Zanni, Arlecchino are northern and with very strong accents.

* Creator/TomScott discusses this difference, at least in English, in his linguistics video [[https://youtu.be/wA2xRVMOThc "Why You Swear in Anglo-Saxon and Order Fancy Food in French: Registers"]].

* In ''Film/SilenceOfTheLambs'' Hannibal Lecter notices FBI agent Clarisse tries to conceal her West Virginia redneck accent.

* Invoked in 12th season episode of WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons "A Tale of Two Springfields". Springfield is divided into two separate area codes by the phone company, with the upper class side of town keeping their existing area code and the city's more blue collar region being changed to the new one. Homer leads the half of Springfield with the new area code in seceding to form the town of New Springfield and the class divide between the two towns is soon established: