ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three social and cultural aspects of language: social class, ethnic background and gender. In the 1960s Bernstein, a British sociologist, began to look at the link between language, class and education. He suggested that working-class and middle-class children use two different types of language: restricted code and elaborated code. Labov, like Bernstein, was interested in the language differences between groups in society. In recent years there has been growing interest in gender differences in language. These differences start early and by the age of 4 to 5 children's language starts to reflect the gender differences found in adults. Cameron describes Lakoff's position as being a deficit model of gender and language. Cameron describes this position as a cultural difference model since it regards gender differences in language as being analogous to differences to other cultural influences such as ethnicity. A different issue in the study of gender and language is the issue of sexism in language.
