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	Language Attitude Survey	Variationist Sociolinguistics
Field	Linguistics	Linguistics
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1992	1972
Originator	Survey methodologists and attitude researchers (e.g., A. N. Oppenheim; Colin Baker; Peter Garrett)	William Labov
Type	Direct self-report survey measure of language attitudes	Quantitative field study of socially conditioned linguistic variation
Seminal source	Garrett, P. (2010). Attitudes to Language. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521759175	Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN: 9780812210521
Aliases	Language Attitude Questionnaire, Direct Attitude Measurement, Language Attitudes Survey	Variationist Analysis, Labovian Sociolinguistics, Quantitative Sociolinguistics
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	Variationist sociolinguistics is the quantitative study of how linguistic variation is structured by social and linguistic factors. Pioneered by William Labov in the 1960s and 1970s, it treats alternative ways of saying the same thing — the 'linguistic variable' — as systematically conditioned by speaker characteristics (class, age, sex, ethnicity), stylistic context, and the surrounding linguistic environment, and it uses statistical modeling of natural speech to reveal the orderly heterogeneity beneath apparent randomness.