Each of them would be that country's own equivalent of rednecks, I think it's fair to say.
'Chav' is a term I stopped using because I realised it was basically racism without the race involved. It's snobbery, it's classist, it's victimising. It targets the working class, primarily white citizenry of Great Britain. The poorest. Often the kinds of people that the newspapers, and sadly much of Britain's population, would refer to as dolescum.
It's nowhere near as common in the vernacular now as it was ten years ago. Ten years ago it had a surge of popularity and you could only distinguish a 'chav' from a trendy person from whether their tracksuit was expensive or not. Tracksuit was part of the uniform by the way. Burberry stuff, or stuff that looked like Burberry, especially the hats; tracksuit, often tucked into one or both socks; hats had to be a baseball cap. On the female side, big, gold jewellery. Doesn't matter how tasteful it is. Taste is optional, if not frowned upon. Leopard-print shit, everywhere, the louder the pattern the better. Lots of pink. And once Primark caught on, lots and lots of pink leopard-print. If a night out was in order, then Americans would find a chav virtually indistinguishable from a Jersey Shore resident; orange tans, big hair regardless of gender. Lots of popped collars on the male side.
Of course, the 'chav' look, like so many things, was a bastardisation of Afro-Caribbean culture, appropriated by white people. Flatten out the peak of the standard chav baseball cap and you could be an extra in a rap a video instead of someone a Daily Mail reader would be surprised to find somewhere other than the queue at the job centre. It's urban culture, taken on by white people, and in a darkly comic fashion, even the 'racism except not about race' prejudice manages to ignore the complete destruction of people of colour in the history of it. And once you put together how much of 'chav' culture is actually urban culture, you realise that what makes chavs so objectionable sounds a whole shitload like what the EDL would say they didn't like about black people - laziness, claiming benefits, the way they dress, the way they speak, the lack of education, the regularly 'unorthodox' family units that are so often much larger than the Queen's mandated 2.4 kids.
Unlike in the redneck end of things, 'chav' culture never really had a pride movement and still doesn't to my knowledge. I never heard it spoken about in those terms. However I will say that on the female side, I think chav culture created a whole shitload of jobs and business owners that never would have happened before. I worked in 16-18 education for six years and I met so many motivated young people who would never have thought of starting their own business if everyone didn't want a manicure these days. Wanting to do nails forever and not have to be told what to do by a manager both sound like very attractive things that override the stiff-borough-ism of 'starting your own business.'
edit: To be clear here; when I am referencing 'the uniform' and shit like this, I am absolutely talking in broad-strokes terms about how the word itself and the trends surrounding it could be defined. I'm not trying to cast any aspersions on the above. My time in education was spent mostly working with young people from this kind of background and I actually actively detested working with more privileged ones on occasion. The characteristics I refer to, also, are perceived ones that 'all' chavs would be seen as having.
