When I was a small boy in Iraq in the 1950s fruit, in particular, loomed large in everyday life. Growing up in a bilingual family, we codeswitched between English and Arabic depending on who you were taking to. Most basic items in daily discourse existed in two sets of vocabulary.
In a recent speech the Ofsted Chief Inspector, Amanda Spielman, commented that, because of having to take the ‘full brunt of economic dislocation in recent years’, ‘white working class communities’ in England lacked ‘the aspiration and drive seen in many migrant communities’ (1).
The growth of terms and labels which refer to language and, by extension, to language users and language learners is a relatively recent phenomenon and perhaps can be explained by the increased interest since the mid-twentieth century in researching linguistic diversity in different socio-educational settings. Ambiguities arise sometimes because of the overlap of meaning between many of the terms or because different authors interpret and use the terms in different ways. There are also differences in use of labels in different countries.
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