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The Importance Of Language In George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion

2352 Words10 Pages
Language offers insight into some of the ways we intentionally or unintentionally express preconceptions about men and women, people of different races and ethnicities, and people in different social classes. We all know of too many overtly negative terms for people of different races, religions, genders and ethnicities. Those are used for explicit intentional ethnic, racial, class and sexual slurs. Language dialects often distinguish between people from higher and lower social classes or from different races. This play was written in early 20th century, the time at which rigid social hierarchy was practiced. Everyone was concerned with maintaining their class distinctions. In George Bernard Shaw’s, play Pygmalion, a woman from London’s lower class, with a distinct Cockney accent, is taught to speck “the king’s English “in order to enter and ultimately fool London’s aristocratic upper class. As a socialist, Shaw was interested in psychological and intellectual realism. He dealt with the social issues prevailing in the society, mainly the issues of religion, education and marriage. One of Shavian ideas that he elaborated was that English need to improve their language by retraining their language through phonetics. So Pygmalion addresses the importance of language and how its function circulated in the society by presenting how the stereotypical idea that linguistic competence is considered as a way of gaining a superficial social status and marked as a source of gaining
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