I would assume this is quite region specific, but this is a question that popped in my mind lately. It could just be my imagination, but I noticed that in the US (where I live) people of more affluent backgrounds tend to pronounce words very clearly, but sometimes use glottal stops, vocal fry, and nasalization (particularly among women). Whereas people who come from more economically disadvantaged backgrounds tend to slur a bit more and use negative concord (I see this in the mid-low class too). Does a similar thing at all happen in Portugal? What kind of accents or grammar quirks do various people do?
@Jemmy, I can only comment on what might apply to Greater Lisbon, my home region. In general, I would say that the perception of socioeconomic class or education level hinges firstly on vocabulary, phrasing and average grammatical correctness. One common stereotype regarding wealthy social circles is that they tend to use ‘você’ as the default form of treatment even in contexts that other people would consider unwarranted, e.g. parents to children, between siblings or friends, or even to their pets.
In terms of pronunciation quirks, a certain subtype of people of higher socioeconomic status might be categorized (again, as a stereotype) as sounding nasal, with sharper consonants and more extended vowels, and especially with aspirated Ts and Ds.
Hearing from here that the use of você tends to be perceived as “abrupt”, that leads me to assume that that alongside some other factors create a strong division between the classes. Is that true? Also, do you have any video examples of people from the various social classes in Lisbon?
Just to be clear, by ‘você’, I meant the indirect use, with the implied pronoun or other alternatives, although between some people, the occasional direct use of ‘você’ is also well accepted.
People speak all sorts of ways, really. TV content such as news reports, interviews or talk shows can give you an idea of this and show that it would be very hard to condense it into generic examples. In any case, for the specific type of pronunciation I mentioned on my previous post, this could perhaps be an example of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyX_e6R7j5Y