Language Attitude Survey

A direct language attitude survey measures what people think and feel about languages, dialects, and varieties by asking them explicitly. Using questionnaires built from Likert scales, semantic-differential items, and open-ended questions, the direct approach gathers respondents' self-reported evaluations of varieties — their prestige, beauty, usefulness, or appropriateness — and analyses these responses for reliability, underlying structure, and differences between social groups. It is the self-report counterpart to indirect techniques such as the matched-guise test, trading some protection against socially desirable answers for transparency, scale, and ease of administration.