Basil Bernstein - Theory of Language Code

Theory of Language Code

Basil Bernstein made a significant contribution to the study of communication with his sociolinguistic theory of language codes. Within the broader category of language codes are elaborated and restricted codes. The term code, as defined by Stephen Littlejohn in Theories of Human Communication (2002), “refers to a set of organizing principles behind the language employed by members of a social group” (p. 178). Littlejohn (2002) suggests that Bernstein’s theory shows how the language people use in everyday conversation both reflects and shapes the assumptions of a certain social group. Furthermore, relationships established within the social group affect the way that group uses language, and the type of speech that is used.

According to James Atherton of the Doceo Teaching and Learning Website, the construct of restricted and elaborated language codes was introduced by Basil Bernstein in 1971. As an educator, he was interested in accounting for the relatively poor performance of working-class students in language-based subjects, when they were achieving scores as high as their middle-class counterparts on mathematical topics. In his theory, Bernstein asserts a direct relationship between societal class and language.

According to Bernstein in Class, Codes and Control (1971),

“Forms of spoken language in the process of their learning initiate, generalize and reinforce special types of relationship with the environment and thus create for the individual particular forms of significance” (p.76). That is to say that the way language is used within a particular societal class affects the way people assign significance and meaning to the things about which they are speaking. Littlejohn (2002) agrees and states, “people learn their place in the world by virtue of the language codes they employ” (p.178). The code that a person uses indeed symbolizes their social identity (Bernstein, 1971).

The most extended empirical examination of Bernstein's code theory was a 10 year project conducted at Macquarie University by Ruqaiya Hasan. Hasan collected data from everyday contexts of interaction between mothers and children across two social locations, designated 'higher autonomy professionals' (families where the main breadwinner had considerable autonomy over their working day) and 'lower autonomy professionals' (families where the main breadwinner had no or very little autonomy with respect to their working day). Hasan found significant differences in the ways these families interacted, and showed, contra William Labov, the existence of 'semantic variation' - that is, different ways of saying with consequences for different ways of meaning. She argues it was these differences in orientation to relevance that explained the differences in educational achievements between middle and working class children first noted by Bernstein in the 1970s.