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In some cases I’d even suspect the incomprehension might go both ways. If the "educated" citizen is truly educated (and not just upper class), they ought to not

• inkyoto 3y ago
  > In some cases I’d even suspect the incomprehension might go both ways. Which is also true. It was a thought experiment to highlight the fact that the lack of comprehension could also arise within the boundaries of a single language. In linguistics, the term for this specific phenomena is «the social register», and there are plenty of active and thriving language that employ the social register in the daily speech. Korean, for instance, is renowned for having a highly complex system of the social registers (effectively, parallel vocabularies) embedded in the spoken language. There are other languages as well. > If the "educated" citizen is truly educated (and not just upper class), they ought to not only understand the lay person, but chose lay words in return. And that is also true. Social registers have largely disappeared from mainland European languages, yet an English accent and the choice of the words of an English speaker can reveal sufficient details about their socio-economic background.