Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

by Barbara Jensen

Payne employed Martin Joos’s 1962 work The Five Clocks to describe five different registers, or types, of language. These registers are (1) Frozen: language that is always the same, for example, the Lord’s Prayer, wedding vows, the Pledge of Allegiance, legal language; (2) Formal: Standard English, the kind of speech expected in schools and in middle class work with complete sentences and very specific syntax and word choices; (3) Consultative: formal register as used in conversation, discourse pattern not quite as linear as formal register; (4) Casual: language between friends characterized by a much smaller vocabulary; with sentence syntax often incomplete and dependent on nonverbal assists; and (5) Intimate: language between lovers, twins, best friends, or other close family members. Payne used Joos’s work to discuss class differences in the uses of formal and casual registers of language. Joos noted that it is socially acceptable to go one register down in a conversation. To drop two registers or more in the same conversation, however, is to be socially offensive.