Since I have provided short chapter overviews at the beginning of this book and since, more particularly, readers will find there rather obvious indications of my own assessments of many of the important themes, this last chapter can be a brief one.

The general underpinning for the work, and my motivation for undertaking it, rest upon my belief that teachers, students and researchers could profit from a broad-brush treatment of the important language issues having educational components or ramifications. To this end, I have provided what I hope is a useful combination of a fairly comprehensive and jargon-free survey with a rich and extensive set of citations for those who need or want them. Of course, I make references to recent research throughout the book, but perhaps it is also necessary to repeat that my reliance on many publications that some may see as venerable or, indeed, antique, is intentional. Many early insights have yet to be bettered, and have inappropriately fallen from general view. Many more modern ones have, I believe, strayed from the paths of the greatest immediacy and relevance for researchers and practitioners – unless, of course, the latter are themselves engaged in what is sometimes narrow work of very limited generalizability, sometimes work that smells strongly of the lamp. But it is not for such readers that this book has been written.

Many great writers, dramatists and other social commentators have observed, in one form or another, that the measure of a society is best discovered in the ways it treats its less fortunate members. This is certainly true when we consider those whose language brings them to the particular attention of the educational system. The attitudes and reactions toward language and dialect varieties derive, of course, from broader underlying ones, and this is why I devote the opening chapters to the manner in which we have understood social disadvantage and, indeed, created it.