We hope that our use of the educational context has been informative for
important aspects of a more general sociolinguistics. Certainly, there are
issues with which we have not been able to deal here: bilingual education,
for example, suggests itself as an important instance of schools' adaptation
to pupils of non-mainstream linguistic backgrouds (see Edwards 1977, 1980,
1981c, in press). However, much of what has been treated here has a wider
relevance. The issues of language and dialect contact, the prescriptivist ideas
of middle-class institutions, the linguistic evidence bearing upon dialect
validity, and the persistence of non-standard varieties: these are all matters
which can be usefully examined, from a social psychological perspective,
within the educational setting, while also having a much broader significance.