A Critical Sociolinguistic Study of Conservatism in Selected British Novels

The main point of this study is to examine the ideology of conservatism in the selected British novels The Blessing by Nancy Mitford and White Teeth by Zadie Smith through the application of a critical sociolinguistic model. These two novels were chosen for having conservatism as the main theme. In this study, conservatism was analyzed according to four phases: the first phase (initiation) shows context and conservatism types. The second phase (description) highlights the text analysis, which involves analyzing vocabulary, grammar, cohesion, and text structure. The third phase represents social analysis, which involves some social factors like age, gender, status, and style. The last phase is evaluation, in which ideology is evaluated according to some selected functions. In both novels, it seems that cultural conservatism is the most commonly used type. Further, it is shown that conservatives tend to use simple words that are easily understood by others. Additionally, declaratives, second and third person pronouns, and modality of necessity and probability are the most followed grammatical categories by conservatives. In relation to social analysis, it is proven that old people are more conservative than young ones, women are more conservative than men, uneducated people are more conservative than educated ones, and informal style is more used than formal style. With regard to evaluating conservatism, it seems that explaining, evaluating, orienting, and prescribing functions are all used in both novels.