Upper-class English in "The Crown". An analysis of dubbing and subtitling

Scholars of English sociolinguistics have always focused more on the language of the lower classes, both in their linguistic history and facts and their translation into other languages. Upper classes, on the contrary, have not been explored as much from the point of view of the language spoken by people belonging to this social stratum, probably due to the fact that it is a smaller social group, characterised by a concrete difficulty to penetrate for investigation purposes. Audiovisual texts are, therefore, a fundamental tool to explore the sociolect of the upper British society, which gives a great opportunity to study at least the representation of this dialect. It is not by chance, then, that the few academic studies on the speech of the British upper classes are precisely on fictional characters of popular TV series and films. Building on the approach of previous studies on the topic (Bruti and Vignozzi 2016; Sandrelli 2016; Ranzato 2017 e 2018), the aim of this paper is that of exploring how the English upper class was linguistically portrayed in the first two seasons of the Netflix TV series The Crown (2016-present). The study will also include the general analysis of the Italian translation of the series, in order to discuss the strategies adopted by professionals to render the sociolect both in its Italian dubbing and subtitles, with the purpose of highlighting how prosodic and lexical compensation can be often fundamental in the complicated process of translating regional and social varieties.