Class, Language, Morality

In the play the relationship between language skills and social class is displayed by Eliza's character and the relationship between social class and morality is displayed by Higgins.
             Eliza is a character that starts off to be a girl who is very poor, not well mannered, and speaks very uneducated. She shows no signs of classiness. After she is transformed into a classy duchess, she easily is passed off as a lady coming from royalty. The main reason Eliza is easily recognized as a classy lady is because she acquired sophisticated language skills taught by Higgins. This fact proves how people can judge another person based on his or her speaking skills. Once hearing a person speak, people generalize him or her to a specific status or social class. If one hears a person talking elegantly with complicated vocabulary and with a sophisticated accent, one would believe this person is educated and belongs to a higher social class. If another person is speaking simple, using incorrect grammar, slang, and uneducated vocabulary, in all honesty one will believe this person belonging to a lower social class. In the play Eliza proves how she can fool people into thinking she is a rich and classy lady by speaking with sophisticated language. At the beginning of the play one can determine that she was a person of lower class based on her dialect and how she spoke. Eliza's accent was very unfamiliar, weird, and her vocabulary seemed to be very uneducated. Even the characters in the beginning of the play generalized her belonging to a lower social class based on how she spoke and later the same characters could not tell she was the same poor girl because the next time they met, Eliza spoke sophisticated like a rich-classy duchess. Even at the end of the play Eliza attended the embassy in London and no one could tell that her origin was from a porr lower class. Eliza's sophisticated language skills was vital in her disguise as a duchess, which proves the point that people can judge another person's social class based on language skills.