Background. The relationship between language and social identity is central in sociolinguistics, particularly in literary texts. In Charles Dickens’s novel Dombey and Son (1848), characters’ speech not only situates them socially but also constructs and reproduces the Victorian middle-class worldview, reflecting commercial, moral, and patriarchal norms. Purpose. This article aims to reconstruct the linguistic worldview of the Victorian middle class in Dombey and Son, analyzing how Dickens uses lexical choice, narrative voice, and dialogues to convey social identity, values, and hierarchical structures. Special attention is given to the integration of business, domestic, and gendered discourse and the contrast between standardized and dialectal speech. Methods. The study applies qualitative, interdisciplinary methods, combining sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and literary analysis. Comparative references to other Dickens novels, such as Great Expectations and Hard Times, provide perspective on middle-class linguistic norms and cognitive modeling. Results. Middle-class characters exhibit lexical precision, syntactic regularity, formal constructions, and modal expressions reflecting discipline, moral propriety, and economic rationality. Sociolectal contrasts with lower-class speech highlight hierarchy. Capitalization of “Son” exemplifies the cognitive functionalization of familial roles in service of commerce, while emotional rupture in characters such as Mrs Dombey or Florence signals limits of normative discourse. Discussion. Language in the novel Dombey and Son encodes and critiques middle-class ideology, integrating commercial logic, moral evaluation, and social hierarchy. Dickens demonstrates that discourse mediates between cognition, social identity, and ethics, highlighting both the power and limitations of normative speech. This analysis contributes to sociolinguistic realism and offers a model for examining language, cognition, and social evaluation in Victorian literature.