Class differences in syntactic complexity in the Flemish town of Maaseik

The linguistic foundation of Bernstein's code theory is tested in a bidimensional sociolinguistic investigation. Not only class, but also situation is controlled. In the Flemish town of Maaseik each of eight informants (four middle class and four working class) have been interviewed in two different situations, one formal and one informal. In the formal situation standard Netherlandic was spoken and in the informal the local dialect. Five measures of syntactic complexity constituted the linguistic variable. The results in the formal situation corroborate those of Bernstein: the middle-class subjects exhibit a greater degree of syntactic complexity than the working-class subjects. In the informal situation all subjects exhibit about the same degree of syntactic complexity, and for the middle-class subjects this degree is less than that in the formal situation (as might be expected). The striking result is that the working-class informants exhibit significantly higher complexity in the informal situation. In the discussion these findings are compared to those of previous studies, Bernsteinian and other. In an appendix sample data for formal and informal styles from one middle- and one working-class subject are presented. (‘elaborated’ and ‘restricted’ codes, social vs. cognitive meaning, syntactic variation; Flemish cf. Maaseik, Belgium).

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