Professional Documents
Culture Documents
, Oxford:
Elsevier.
Class Language
Allan Luke
1 Nanyang Walk
Singapore 637616
Phil Graham
University of Waterloo
&
University of Queensland
Brisbane, Queensland
Australia 4064
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Abstract
How social class factors in linguistic practices, language change, and loss has been a
planning, and sociology of language. Key foci of linguistic and sociological research
include the study of social class in everyday language use, media and institutional texts. A
linguistic habitus and cultural capital offers a broad theoretical template for examining
these relations, even as they are complicated by forces of economic and cultural
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Class Language
The relationship between language and social class is a key theoretical and empirical
research. It has been a focal point for postwar and current policy in language planning,
and language and literacy education. The central questions of a class analysis of language
are stated in Mey’s (1985) proposal for a Marxian pragmatics: “Whose language”
counts? With what material and social consequences? For which communities and social
groups? Central concerns are how language factors into the intergenerational
and how communities, families, schools, mass media, and governments contribute to
“linguistic inequality” (Hymes, 1996). Current research continues to table and debate
contending definitions of language and social class as social and economic phenomena.
mental and material labor. The “language of real life”, he argued, is “directly interwoven”
with “material activity and …mental intercourse” (Marx & Engels, 1846/1972: p. 118).
religion, metaphysics etc. of a people”. “Sense experience”, the work of the eye and ear,
the hand and mouth, are the basis not only of science and philosophy, but of communal
and social life (Marx, 1844/1960: pp. 160-166). At the same time, Marx’s (Marx &
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Engels, 1846/1972: p. 37) classical definition of ideology as a “camera obscura” that
presents an inverted reality helped to explain and establish the centrality of language in
the distortion and misrepresentation of social and economic reality in social class
interests.
Marxist theory establishes three critical traditions in the analysis of language and class.
These are: the analysis of language as a form of class-based social action and ideological
consciousness; the analysis of social class and linguistic variation; and the analysis of
language as the medium for power and control, ideology and truth in specific linguistic
each utterance and text is a revoicing of previous historical speaker and writers. The
ideological content and social functions of each speech act or speech genre bear their own
material historical origins. That is, they are produced and reproduced by and though
face-to-face language exchanges are instances of class conflict and ideological difference,
where class-located social actors bring to bear distinctive material interests and discourse
positions. The point of such analysis is to extend the notion of the situated speaking and
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writing subject to a closer sociological and economic analysis of structural position.
attention to the linguistic construction of gender, race, sexual preference, and other forms
If utterances and their use are indexical of social class consciousness, what might this
mean for differing cultural groups, communities and their historical practices? Following
Vygotsky, Luria (1982) argued the cognitive uses of the “tool” of language were mediated
by one’s social relations, cultural practices, and material conditions. Luria’s studies of the
Uzbecs made the claim that particular forms of cognition and consciousness, what Marx
referred to as capacity at the “production of ideas”, were linked to cultural practices and
material conditions of tool use. The cognitive and ideological affordances of language
and literacy are mediated by material economic and social conditions, including class
In contemporary literacy theory, Paulo Freire also argued for the direct links between
language and social class consciousness. Freire’s (1972) prototypical work was
concerned with the effects of literacy education upon the language and consciousness of
the indigenous population and peasantry of postwar Brazil. Bringing together Marxist
dialectics with liberation theology, he argued that autocratic governments and education
in ways that mis-named and misrecognised the world. Freire’s work views ideologically
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For Freire, critique of class consciousness was achieved through an educational process
of ‘renaming’ the world in ways that demystified power, consciousness and life, a similar
agenda to that of Mey (1985), Chouliaraki and Fairclough (2001), and other
contemporary critical linguists. Current agendas for the teaching of “critical literacy” and
critical discourse analysis stand in this Marxist tradition, focusing on the demystification,
critique, and reconstruction of language that supports dominant class interests (Luke,
2003).
A further concern in the analysis of language and social class is how language variation
acts as a marker and instrument of social class, racial and other forms of social
stratification. A principal concern of sociolinguists in the postwar period has been over
the effects of the differential and inequitable spread of economic and social capital on the
decolonization, migration and geopolitical conflict upon linguistic retention and stability.
Flows of global, regional and national capital have visible impacts upon language loss,
use and retention (Pennycook, 1998). In the postwar period, sociolinguistic and language
planning research has engaged with the effects of the unequal spread and distribution of
economic capital upon language loss. Yet attempts to theorise and empirically describe
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the complex reproductive relationships of language and social class continued to be
colleagues (e.g., Bernstein, 1975) took up this challenge. This work provided an account
achievement. Bernstein’s argument was that working class students spoke a “restricted
code”, characterized by embedded and literal meanings, limited command of deixis, and
“elaborated code” which was fitted for educational success and mastery of academic and
scientific discourses. These, he argued, were tied to particular forms of early childhood
language socialization and family structure (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1992). Bernstein’s
work was the object of several decades of controversy. Labov’s (2001) studies of urban
studies of early class-based language socialization, made the case against models of
linguistic deficit. Bernstein’s model has been defended by systemic functional linguists,
who argue that there are indeed elaborated technical registers and contents, specific
language domains affiliated with power, some of which particular social classes make
explicitly available in early language socialization and educational training (Hasan &
Williams, 1996).
indeed have different speech patterns, varying in lingua franca, register, dialect, accent
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and diglossia. These, further, are affiliated with class-based social consciousness and
cultural practices (Fishman, 1992). Ethnographic studies have shown how that these
variations are made to count in local social networks and institutions (Milroy, 1988). But
the social and cultural bases and material consequences of such differences remain
sociological theory of social class, of “linguistic markets” (Mey, 1985; Bourdieu, 1992),
structures.
economic location and material position. They attempt to define position and power vis a
affiliate social class with particular ‘class consciousness’, of which language, its use and
view that class position is at least in part structurally determined. But it is also embodied
by human subjects in their “habitus”, the sum total of socially acquired dispositions.
cultural capital. This capital, and affiliated forms of embodied taste, style and ideology,
constitutes a key marker of one’s social class position and mobility. Linguistic capital is
deployed in specific social fields, which constitute “linguistic markets”. Each market,
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each institutional context, in turn has variable rules and conventions of exchange,
not. There language use – as class marker and tool – has exchange value and power only
in relation to other forms of capital, including social capital (e.g., networks, institutional
This is a more complex and delicate view of the relationships between language and
social class. Language matters, as a primary marker of class, gender and culture, training,
poststructuralist theories of discourse, Bourdieu’s model views language not just an index
or marker of class position, but as reflexively constituting position and identity, power
and categorical social status. In this way, how language marks class, capital, and power
code or class position per se, or the ostensive power of any given utterance, genre or text
(Luke, 1996). This contingency is dependent on the availability of other forms of capital,
and the variable, historically shifting norms, rules and conventions of particular social
CURRENT ISSUES
and functional linguistics was that it lacked a sufficient analysis of power, capital, and
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“social network” are often based on structural functionalist models of society and culture.
The study of language and social class requires the rigorous analysis of social and
economic relations within and between speech communities. Current work on language
and social class continues to examine how language represents class consciousness, how
it is implicated in ongoing issues of class conflict and cohesion, and how its acquisition
and use are central to intergenerational production of social stratification of material and
discourse resources.
linked to social class. Linguistic performance, text and discourse production, does indeed
have both symbolic and material exchange value, particularly in service and information
based economies. But these values depend upon the complex local economic and
analytic frame for analyzing how language ‘counts’ in specific institutional fields,
disciplinary and knowledge fields, and everyday social contexts. It suggests that issues
around ‘whose language’ counts, which classes have power, require a rigorous
globalisation, these sociological and sociolinguistic contexts and conditions are under
ideology and discourse, material goods, and social relations. The move in globalized
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key challenges to linguistic and ethnographic studies. First, linguistic, semiotic, and
consumption, shifting the basis of social class relations—language—to the staus of means
(Castells, 2003) as much as it might be defined in classical Marxist terms. Finally, the
formation of social class identity, ideology and speech community have become more
complex. They are now strongly influenced by forces of mass culture, mass media, and
One of the principal claims of poststructuralist and postmodern theory of the past decade
has been a breakdown of essential relationships between discourse and social class as a
without due consideration of the complexity of cultural and racial, gender and religious
identity and position. Any analysis of language and social class must engage with this
complexity. But perhaps more than ever, any contemporary sociological analysis that
includes class and intersecting categories must engage with the constitutive place of
language, text, and discourse in the constitution and reproduction of ideology, class
References
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Bernstein, B. (1975) Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies towards Sociology of
Bourdieu, P. (1992) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.C. (1992) Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society. 2nd
Castells, M. The Rise of the Network Society. (2000) 2nd Ed. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers.
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Hasan, R. & Williams, G. (eds.) (1996) Literacy in Society. London: Longman.
Heath, S.B. (1982). Ways with Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Francis.
Blackwell.
Luria, A.R. (1982) Language and Cognition. New York: John Wiley.
Luke, A. (1996) Genres of power? In R. Hasan & G. Williams, (eds.) Literacy in Society
Luke, A. (2004) Two takes on the critical. In B. Norton & K. Toohey, (eds.) Critical
Press.
Marx, K. (1845/1972) Early Writings. Trans. T.B. Bottomore. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1846/1972) The German Ideology. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Benjamins.
Voloshinov. V.I. (1973). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Seminar
Press.
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Keywords: social class, power, capital, equality, globalisation, social networks,
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Possible cross-references: ideology, poststructuralism, language planning, critical
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Biographical Notes:
Allan Luke is Dean of the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, National
books include: Struggles over Difference (State University of New York Press) and
and literacy education, educational policy and sociology, and critical discourse analysis.
Phillip Graham holds a Canada Research Chair in Communication and Technology at the
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