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Re-examining Bernstein: Class, codes, and language in a multilingual/multicultural world

The 1960s Britain that gave birth to the Beatles as well as British cultural studies was still considered as predominantly a mono-cultural, monolingual society split by traditionally marked class divisions. Even though changes in the structure of educational opportunity had begun to erode class differences through the broadening of access to education over the preceding decade, and even though post-colonial immigration had begun to bring cultural heterogeneity, Britain remained a predominantly white, class-based society (Halsey 1980, 1995). Social class divisions were manifest in most aspects of daily life including most forms of public discourse. Basil Bernstein’s achievement was to propose as early as the 1950s that these discourse differences themselves resulted in the differentiated social experiences of class. His writings introduced the notion of language difference into the debate over the consequences of educational opportunity and its propensity for social change (Bernstein 1958, 1959, 1972). The intellectual climate of these debates forms a necessary background for reading Bernstein’s theorizing and for his early empirical investigations. From today’s perspective Basil Bernstein is known as one of the seminal figures in early sociolinguistics whose work played a part in setting an agenda for the new discipline (Cazden, John & Hymes 1974; Gumperz & Hymes 1972; Dittmar 1976). While what are now regarded as dominant sociolinguistic paradigms had originated in the US, Bernstein’s focus on language as a cultural force was mediated through his more European concern with the problems of the perpetuation of a class divided society. At the time Bernstein was writing many linguists and sociolinguists tended to take a largely descriptive approach to issues of social difference, by looking at the variability of specific features of language and relating these to a priori social