This article engages with Bourdieu's notion of field as a "space of play" to explore what happens to the educational field and the linguistic regimes operating within it in a site in which new discourses and practices of identity, language, "race", and ethnicity become entangled with local economies of meaning. The context is a…

This article discusses issues in measuring lexical diversity, before outlining an approach based on mathematical modelling that produces a measure, D, designed to address these problems. The procedure for obtaining values for D directly from transcripts using software (vocd) is introduced, and then applied to thirty-two children from the Bristol…