Basil Bernstein argues that speech events bear class characteristics, and different social classes exhibit different linguistic typologies, coding and meaning. Although working-class language is characterized as a closed code in terms of its language structure, it possesses unique educational power, specifically manifesting as its unique meanings…

Could the standardisation of language narrow disparities in achievement in education amongst people of different social class, and within and across ethnicities and genders, and could this have implications for injustices and inequities in wider society? In analysing socio-economic diversity through the lens of its correlation with language, this…

'Race applied to human beings is a "political" division: it is a system of governing people that classifies them into a social hierarchy based on invented biological demarcations' (Roberts, 2011, p. x). Foregrounding our racialized histories, we show how our lives "intersect" in a doctoral seminar in Thailand. Combining…

Language variation in a context is influenced by various factors. While there has been some research regarding English language variation, there has not been much research pertaining to Chinese variation (Gao, 2017; Xu, 2015). In the present study, we examined different language usages among different social classes of Tianjin in China in order to…

The study presented here is the first empirical investigation of attitudes towards Multicultural London English (MLE), the multiethnolect spoken in England's main metropolis. An online questionnaire was used to gather data from 800 participants, including MLE speakers as well as non-MLE speakers from a wide variety of different backgrounds. The…

The geographical proximity and socioeconomic dependence on the United States brought about a deep-rooted anglicization of the Cuban Spanish lexis and social strata, especially throughout the Neocolonial period (1902-1959). This study is based on the revision of a renowned newspaper of that time, "Diario de la Marina," and the…

In line with what Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010) describe as a cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences and given the growing interest in cosmopolitanism as a result of neoliberalism (Bernstein et al., 2015) and the global rise in the use of English (Seargeant, 2012), this article investigates the ideology of cosmopolitanism by drawing on the…

Mirroring the heterogeneity of Spanish-speaking bilingual teachers and students in the United States, the authors reflect on their diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds to interrogate what it means to be "linguistically qualified" to prepare bilingual teachers in the United States. Through critical collaborative autoethnographies,…

Basil Bernstein (1971) introduced the notion of the Restricted and the Elaborated code, claiming that working-class speakers have access only to the former but middle-class members to both. In an attempt to test this theory in the Iranian context and to investigate the effect of social class on the quality of students language use, we examined the…

This article makes a case for studying the perceptions that young people have of the ways of speaking of both themselves and others on the supposition that constructions of ambient sociolinguistic variation have an impact on the language development and use of individual language users. Such a study is particularly relevant in multilingual…

Young people's perceptions may offer an insight into the complex associations between language, education and social class. However, little research has asked young people what they think of their own talking. Forty-two British adolescents aged between 14 and 15 years were interviewed: 21 attended a school in a working class area; 21 attended…

The prestige accorded to standard language varieties, particularly within the field of education, together with language management role of schools with respect to the variety and the extent to which linguistic differences construct discontinuous relationships between the school and specific social groups provide the rationale for this paper. This…

This is an expanded version of a paper given at a conference held in Cape Town, South Africa from December 11-13, 2008 entitled "The Native Speaker and the Mother Tongue." In keeping with the conference's themes of exploring and interrogating the notions of "mother tongue" and "native speaker," I consider…

This study examines the language experiences of two distinct Chinese immigrant groups in the U.S.: a Mandarin-speaking group and a Fujianese-speaking group across two generations. The different language trajectories of the parents' generation, along with their social class and different settlement patterns in the U.S., shaped the second-generation…

Recent studies of Asian American youth language practices have presented compelling insights about the identities and migration experiences of young people of Asian descent. This article offers a detailed examination of the relationship between language use and select issues concerning Asian American youth, including social life, schooling,…