Sociolinguistics of Style and Social Class in Contemporary Athens

Abstract

This ethnographic study deals with the ways people in Athens, Greece, use style to construct their social class identities. Including a rich dataset comprising ethnographic interviews with actual people who live in the stereotypically seen as leafy and posh northern suburbs and in the stereotypically treated as working class western suburbs of Athens coupled with data from popular literary novels, TV series and Greek hip hop music, it argues that the relationship between style and social class identity is mediated by complex social meanings encompassing features from and discourses relevant to both areas, which are structured across different orders of indexicality depending on the genre of speech in which they are created. As such, it will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, sociology, Modern Greek studies, and to everyone who is interested in how social class is constructed via language.