This article investigates linguistic practices related to students' social and academic lives -- something that has been overlooked in the research literature on international schooling and elite boarding schools. Pierre Bourdieu reminds us that language has a social dimension linked to relations of symbolic power. Boarding schools serve as excellent case studies on how language structures social life due to their closed social space. Drawing on Bourdieu's relational sociology, an ethnography was carried out at the College of Europe, an international private boarding school. Findings show that the practice of bilingual code-switching was endowing the institution with social distinction while hierarchically dividing its students. Three modes of student attitudes towards bilingualism were identified. While students' bilingual attitudes and strategies were correlated to their social positions, socioeconomic origins and previous trajectories, the former were not deterministically an effect of said social position, evidenced by an observed case of habitus transformation.