ABSTRACT
This chapter considers possible diversity within a single language. Diversity within a language may be due to geographical location, class, sex or ethnic background. Differences in pronunciation within a language make for differences of accent. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that social class affects language at a number of different levels. Over twenty years ago in the United States, the sociolinguist William Labov investigated the effects of social stratification on a number of phonological variables in speech. However, the person who suggested the most radical effects of class and language is not a linguist at all but a sociologist Basil Bernstein. Bernstein's investigations also began in the early 1960s; he proposed that working-class and middle-class people used distinctly different linguistic codes. The important point is that Bernstein should have recognized that social context, as well as the cognitive operations involved in language, exerts a powerful influence on the temporal structure of language.
