Linguistic ethnographic perspectives on working-class children’s speech: challenging discourses of deficit

This chapter considers what a linguistic ethnographic approach can add to the long tradition of sociolinguistic work that has sought to challenge dialect prejudice and ‘deficit’ perspectives on working-class children’s speech. This linguistic ethnographic approach involves relinquishing the perceived objectivity and empirical rigour of quantitative analyses of language variation in favour of examining children’s language use in its full ethnographic context. I argue that this approach can help researchers and educational practitioners to better understand the meanings children invest in their use of local dialect, and thus why they will persist in using non-standard forms despite their teachers’ protestations and wider social prejudice. Recent attempts in the UK to ban the use of local dialect at school are therefore futile and may have unintended negative consequences.