ABSTRACT
Many children and young people grow up in communities where the language of the home and the immediate community is a non-standard dialect of English or an English-based Creole, some of whose grammatical, lexical and sound features differ from their equivalents in Standard English. The linguistic situation of these children and young people is often complex. Some of them, for example those with a background in the Caribbean who also use the indigenous non-standard dialect of the place in the UK where they live, have access to more than one non-standard variety of English. (Multilingual children and young people use non-standard varieties of their languages too. Many of the Bengali-speaking children in schools in England, for instance, speak a form of the language significantly different from that of printed books.) These speakers may move between varieties of English or use mixtures of them as a result of often unconscious decisions made in context.
