Caroline

How does the show use language to convey the social identity of Caroline?

Language Variety

Totally opposite to Max, Caroline is a very sophisticated, cheerful and smart girl coming from an upper-class, millionaire family background. She has a very typical and princess-like physical appearance. Blond hair with blue eyes, average height and slender legs which portray similar to Barbie. The wealthy background makes her language more upper-class and feminine way as she always appears to be polite at the beginning of the show. We will analyse this later on.

Standard English, also known as the language of educated, upper-class and noble is typiaclly regarded as being high prestige. Female language is more like a ‘lady talk’, it is always to be more conservative of expression, polite, indirect and refined than men and normally shows less confident, uncertain, and more powerless versions of male language. Some characteristics of female language are:

• Lexical hedges (such as “you know“, “sort of“, “well…“)
• ‘Empty’ adjectives (such as “cute“, “nice“, “wonderful“)
• Intensifiers (such as “it’s so nice to meet you“)
• Apologies
• ‘Super-polite’ forms
• Euphemisms and understatements

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What does the choice of these varieties tell us about issues of language and social identity, language attitude, stereotypes, and language and ideology?

Politeness and Intensifiers

Since Caroline is from an upper-class, her language use is more feminine and polite way which links to the “super-polite form” in one of the female language features. In episode 01, she begins to introduce herself by greeting and tries to get attached to Max. Caroline shows politeness paralinguistically too, such as with her body language and use of gesture like in the screenshot below:

Also she shows her politeness by smiling to people when talking, looking at people’s eyes to present politeness and attention.

Euphemism

Caroline uses plenty of words with femininity such as ‘may’, ‘not to complain’, ‘l hope’, ‘l hope’ to express her feelings in a more euphemistic way. In addition, Caroline employs euphemism when she explains that she lied on her resume, claiming she ‘enhanced’ it rather than fabricated it:

Feminine Stereotyping

According to the screenshot attached when Caroline hits Max with her pink teaser, she said “l didn’t think it would hurt so much. It’s pink.” The use of lexical word ‘pink’ Implying that her identity is more princess-like. In previous part of episode 01, Oleg called Caroline ‘Barbie’. This even supports more evident towards her upper-class identity.

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