Class, Language and Education is a discussion about complex social forces that shape society and are responsible for the divisiveness and antagonism in a class system. The author's analysis supports Basil Bernstein's (1972) observation that "One of the effects of the class system is to limit access to elaborated codes." According to Newsum, mainstream educationalists and linguists associate abstract thinking and the linguistic self-sufficiency of the message to users of "elaborated codes (i.e., the educated and well-to-do class), and cognitive poverty to users of "restricted codes (i.e., the underclasses and the downtrodden).

"A great advancement in social-linguistics and the philosophy of language. Newsum provides us with a remarkable demonstration of the fact that language is a social phenomenon, as he effectively analyzes the relationship between power and language. The dominant class creates, uses, and controls language to maintain their position of dominance, their way of life—the oppressed contend with limited access to the meta-language of sophistication, power, and control."
                                                                                                                                                                              —Manning Marable

H.E. Newsum (Ike Okafor) is associate professor of Black Studies at the Ohio State University and Program Manager of the OSU Black Studies Community Extension Center. He has co-authored two other books, The Use of English  (1983) and United States Foreign Policy Towards Southern Africa  (1987).

CATEGORIES:

Linguistics, Sociology/Africa