Sociology and ideas about language
Bernstein and social codes
This might also be said to be the case with the third figure we consider in this discussion of language and social action, Bernstein. Indeed, the defense of Bernstein against the charge that his core distinction between an elaborated code (characteristically used by the middle classes) and a restricted code (characteristically used by the working classes) was a normative one, has been to argue that such codes do not refer to dialects or sociolects, but to codes in the more formal structuralist sense discussed above. (See, for example, Atkinson 1985, Grillo 1989.) It is not germane to our purposes to review the extensive debate provoked by Bernstein's formulation and the accusation that it was unavoidably pejorative of working-class modes of language. Rather we shall sketch out an interpretation of Bernstein's work which draws attention to the relation between language and social action.
In fact, our view of Bernstein's work is similar to that of Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999: 107-19) in that we too see Bernstein's primary concern as being with social class relations and symbolic control. Bernstein himself sought to make the notion of the restricted code distinct from that of actual language use:
It [the restricted code] simply means that there is a restriction on the contexts and on the conditions which will orient the child to universalistic orders of meaning and to making those linguistic choices through which such meanings are realized and so made public. It does not mean that the children cannot produce at any time elaborated speech in particular contexts. It is critically important to distinguish between speech variants and a restricted code. (Bernstein 1970: 118)
Bernstein's codes, then, are structural codes which guide and regulate the way language is organized. The public or restricted code uses unfinished sentences, chained clauses, formulaic expressions, whilst the formal or elaborated code is characterized by more complex syntax, greater explicitness and so on. Through associated kinds of language use, codes are linked to particular forms of social solidarity: the working class achieves solidarity through a limited stock of idiomatic expressions, or as Atkinson (1985: 43) expresses it, the 'affirmation and confirmation of pre-existing, shared meanings and orientations', whilst the middle class socializes children more as individuals through the explicit negotiation of meanings.
In view of this it is unsurprising, perhaps, that Bernstein's work was interpreted in ways which suggested that the languages and cultures of the working class were in some sense deficient in, or lacking the capacity for, extended thought. As Grillo (1989: 202) has pointed out, such charges tend to miss the main thrust of Bernstein's work: 'It is undoubtedly the social system whose values the educational system reflects which makes of difference a deficit.' However, our reservations about his approach take a different form.
Principally, Bernstein, in common with theorists of a structuralist provenance, operates with a restricted view of agency (Bernstein 1970, 1996). Like Bourdieu's notion of habitus with which it has much in common, Bernstein's code is the eminence grise of social life, relativizing perspectives, individuating human subjects and constraining behavior. This is, in other words, a 'top down' account of social life and, in common with many such accounts, pays little attention to the emergent nature of social interaction or to the possibility, arising from such interactions, that people might contribute to altering the code.
The theorists we have considered have sought to develop dualistic accounts of the relation between social action and language. That is, Habermas, Bourdieu and Bernstein have placed language at the forefront of their analysis of the social world and have recognized its partial autonomy from individuals and its power to influence directly the nature of their social interactions. However, as we have indicated, their work does not fully incorporate the analysis of language itself into a social theory of language and languages.
