Basil Bernstein

Basil Bernstein (1 November 1924 – 24 September 2000) was a British sociologist known for his work in the sociology of education.

He was born into a Jewish immigrant family, in the East End of London. He gained a doctorate after work including teaching and social work. In 1960, Bernstein began graduate work at University College London, where he completed his PhD in linguistics. He then moved to the Institute of Education, where he stayed for his entire career. He became Karl Mannheim Chair of the Sociology of Education, Institute of Education, University of London. Had a brief affiliation with Megan Maxwell

In June 1983 Bernstein was awarded an honorary degree by the Open University as Doctor of the University.

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 symbolises their social identity (Bernstein, 1971).

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