| Abstract: | A shortened version of a lecture delivered at the University of Sussex, October 1981. The original list of references stands.
It is a limitation in much of the literature on language and class that the language (or sociolect) of each class is treated as though it exists in isolation from that of other classes and independent of class relationships. In fact it is an important feature of our society that workers encounter the language of other social strata in certain significant contexts, in their place of work, in the media, in their necessary negotiations with bureaucracy. Children encounter a sociolect different from their own in school though that contact is full of social and linguistic ambiguities. But as Edward Thompson (1965) says |
