It is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty. For de Saussure, langue constituted a particular part of linguistic expressions. In a sense, Bernstein's sociology is concerned with uncovering the grammar of social signs. While Saussurean structuralism lies at the heart of much of Bernstein's sociological work, in a sense, the prescriptivist values which it explicitly rejects do too. At least this is what the critics of Bernstein's code theory have claimed.
Prescriptivism has a long history.
In the thick of this tradition, which took literary and classical languages to be of greater expressive capacity and complexity, structuralists in the U.S. sought to carry out a program of research that assumed that all languages of the world are cast from the same die. This egalitarian view came in direct conflict with the long-seated tradition in the humanities that values a language variety in direct proportion to its literary output. Written in French, the Port Royale Grammar formed part of the movement to displace Latin as an outdated mode of academic discourse. However, what marked the Port Royale Grammar as deeply distinct from contemporaneous approaches was its devotion to philosophical and universal properties of human language in descriptive terms. The Port Royale grammarians worked on the Cartesian assumption that normal human intelligence is capable of acquiring knowledge through its own internal resources, making use of the data of experience but moving on to construct a cognitive system in terms of concepts and principles that are developed on independent grounds.