Toward a Century of Language Attitudes Research: Looking Back and Moving Forward

Abstract

The study of language attitudes is concerned with the social meanings people assign to language and its users. With roots in social psychology nearly a century ago, language attitudes research spans several academic disciplines and draws on diverse methodological approaches. In an attempt to integrate this work and traverse disciplinary boundaries and methodological proclivities, we propose that language attitudes—as a unified field—can be organized into five distinct—yet interdependent and complementary—lines of research: documentation, explanation, development, consequences, and change. After highlighting some of the key findings that have emerged from each area, we discuss several opportunities and challenges for future research.

Do faces speak volumes? Social expectations in speech comprehension and evaluation across three age groups

“…Finally, it could be that variation in social categorization (and familiarity with a specific accent) resulted in intra- and intergroup variation in language attitudes [ 1 ]. Once foreign or regional accents become salient as social categories, listeners activate stereotypes or attitudes, which may or may not be influenced by the additional social category evoked by the static picture.…”

“…The ways in which social attributions to a person’s appearance and voice influence language processing have been a topic of recent debates. A large body of research has provided evidence that personal attributes of a speaker such as gender, ethnicity, regional or linguistic background have a profound effect on language attitudes, speech comprehension, and accent or competence evaluations (e.g., see [ 1 ], for a recent review, and [ 2 – 13 ]). These effects are often assumed to reflect an activation of linked social and linguistic information, which can result from learned associations between linguistic patterns and a range of non-linguistic contexts [ 14 ] as well as from ideological connections and speaker’s attitudes [ 15 ].…”

Development of a Chinese College Students' Attitudes Toward Sexual Swear Words Scale

“…As an important field in social psychology, study of attitude has a long history. Although there are dozens of different definitions, most social psychologists generally agree that “an attitude is an evaluative reaction to an object” (Dragojevic et al, 2021 ). However, there is less agreement about the structure of attitudes.…”

Standard Singapore English : evaluating Singapore's standard English variety

“…For example, one may form the belief that Singlish is uncouth, and evaluate uncouth as bad. Based on this model, a large number of language attitude studies have investigated language attitudes in terms of evaluative beliefs, which can be broadly classified into two categories: evaluative beliefs about language varieties, and evaluative beliefs about the speakers of language varieties (Dragojevic et al, 2021). Like the majority of studies on language attitudes, the present study focuses on the latter, examining evaluative beliefs about speakers of SSE as heard in the speech stimuli.…”

“…However, this is not to say that the study describes only SSE speakers and not SSE itself. Evaluative beliefs about language varieties and those about their speakers are strongly interrelated (Dragojevic et al, 2021), and this study uses evaluative beliefs about SSE speakers as a vehicle to shed light on attitudes held towards SSE more generally.…”