ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the symbolic organization of language use in an international private school, with a prestigious reputation and characterized by linguistic and cultural diversity. The school is at once concerned with academic prestige and with multilingualism as a valuable resource, and the chapter focuses on how this plays out linguistically, how these concerns relate to the everyday management of linguistic purity and hybridity, and how some forms of linguistic diversity are positioned as more valuable than others. The chapter sets out in a linguistic and ethnographic study and examines explicit and implicit beliefs about language and linguistic diversity as they are expressed and enacted among teachers and pupils. It discusses these in relation to dominating language regimes and patterns of social stratification in the wider Danish society, as well as in relation to how such beliefs have been (re)produced in urban public school contexts in previous research. It shows that multi-monolingualism norms are generally dominating within formal educational activities, and how standard Danish has a very different status in this school from what is the case in Danish educational settings more generally, and thereby does not straightforwardly reproduce wider patterns of social stratification in Danish society.
