Do they have a class system in Poland?

I was talking to an Indian the other day who was telling me about the Caste system they have in india. I was wondering, is there a class system in Poland or is everybody treated the same?

I've been asked quite a lot about the class system in England so I thought I'd share it with you to clear up any confusion.

English class is divided into 3 categories:

Working class are people that work 9 to 5.

Middle class are people that have financial assets, own home and shares in a company.

Upper class people are those that were born into aristocracy, or who have become a key person either through wealth or family ties.

As you can imagine there is tension between working class and middle class people. The traditional english accent or "posh" accent is generally how people identify someone of middle class, thus working class people ridicule those who speak with a posh accent. Confused middle class children (who wish to be accepted by their peers) sometimes try to speak slang.

Fact:

The word "chav" was developed and promoted enmasse by middle class teenagers who were tired of being bullied by their working class peers either for being posh or by following alternative lifestyles such as emo.

As there are more working class than middle class outsiders of English culture generally assume that a chav is just an average british person, but its real roots lie fimly in the cultural divide between middle class and working class kids.

Some say that the term was inspired from the scottish people who refer to people who live on council estates, dress in track suits as "neds".

i don't think you can catergorise the classes as you have done. Many working class own their own homes etc etc and a high percentage of the middle class work 9-5,if anything the working class are more likely to wotk unsociable hours and not 9-5. So, please catergorise the classes correctly in the future if you feel the need to do so again.

There are many sociology books available out there!!

not sure if i want to make too much of class divides but 2 social groups that are growing in size are the young, upwardly mobile and the nouveaux riche...

there is still apparent poverty everywhere you look...

not sure which angle you are coming from but.... if you look at it from a humanistic point of view there has to be poverty and all other levels in society for it to function??

Of course it's not set in stone but remember middle class people dont just own homes they own businesses aswell meaning they have people working for them.

The whole working class tag is based on the assumption that you go to work for someone else (a boss) and get paid for it. That's what makes someone working class, if you're further on in life (i.e. your own company) and you're not working for someone else, then your middle class.

You can act middle class but the majority vote is that unless you've got assets, a company and a house then your still working class.


But I did notice tention between 2 groups of people. I noticed a lot of Poles I met in other places don't like people from Warsawa.

Some of the people said that they were snobs. One girl I spoke to in Warsawa said she dont like Poles from some area (i cant remember the name) as they speak in slang and use dirty words such as nara when they greet each other.

is nara a rude way of saying hello? or is it that posh poles don't like to use any slang? We have a similar class based language issue in England.

na ra is a shortened form of na raze which is a perfectly accpetable way of saying see you later... i say it and no one has suggested i dont...


there is a lot of tension between warszawians and people from other cities... my friends in the 3city complain of an arrogance... but there is a similar attitude between capital and provinsal cities in most countries i think...

why dont you register Lee...? :)

If you ask that question you dont know much about Poland. We are still victims of our history because in those times (50 years) we had to be equals, dont be different, dont have anything more. So in Poland were working class and village people and government which sat rules. Now we change our way of life but we havent changed our hobits and way of thinking.

Now in Poland we have small number of rich people, huge..... poor, and small poorest.

Warszawians are... who are they?? They are mostly village people who came 10 or 20 years ago. People who say bad things about Warsawians they usually dont know any of them, and envy because they think that warsawians have better and eazier life... what is not true.

Yes. Poor, average and rich.

you forgot the extremely class, Grzeg... extremely poor and extremely rich...

And you forgot about extremely average...

so i did

Bubba I would but I share the same ip adress as half of North London (it's an NTL problem). Sandy said North london is banned because a troll registered, posted a load of crap and admin banned the north london IP address.

Gosc, I admit I don't know much about Poland. I'm not Polish but I am interested in learning about the country.

Some visible classes of people in Poland are:
*"people with coledge degree" - some would limit their contacts only to those with coledge education; would dare to ask for your education socially and look down upon you if you don't have one

*people from nobility (szlachta) - they would ask for your name and if it doesn't sounds familiar to them would discriminate against you ever since

*new money people - they want to know how much are you worth and if they are your league or lower or higher. (easy to put them down claiming nobility but coledge wouldn't impress them)

*clergy - large and special group in Poland; they don't do things like cooking or cleaning (they have poeple to do it for them instead); recently into cool things like playing soccer or playing electric guitar, rock singing and business

* people from very small towns, villages - often suffering from questions like "where are your from?" (similar suffering to the one experienced by those "having bad address")

:)

hey peeps

i've seen the word troll a number of times in various posts
what does troll stand for?

or do you mean troll as in mythical creature like cave troll

In Internet terminology, a troll is a person who enters an established community such as an online discussion forum and intentionally tries to cause disruption, often in the form of posting messages that are inflammatory, insulting, incorrect, inaccurate, absurd, or off-topic, with the intent of provoking a reaction from others.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll

cheers Bubbawoo

(here's me thinking lord of the rings " :)