Language Attitudes and Ideology
Language attitudes and ideology studies the beliefs and evaluations people hold about languages and their speakers, and the broader systems of ideas that link language to social and political order.
Definition
Language attitudes and ideology is the area of sociolinguistics concerned with the evaluations speakers make of language varieties and their users, and with language ideologies, the systems of belief that connect language to identity, morality, and power.
Scope
This area covers attitudes toward varieties and their speakers, the methods used to elicit them such as the matched-guise technique, and the wider notion of language ideology as culturally shared beliefs that rationalize language structure and use. It includes overt and covert prestige, the ideology of a single correct standard, and prescriptivism. The measurement of variation itself belongs to the variation-and-change area, and policy consequences of these ideologies are treated under language planning.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What attitudes do people hold toward different language varieties and their speakers?
- How can such attitudes be measured indirectly?
- What is a language ideology, and how does it shape perception of language?
- How do ideologies of standardness and correctness arise and operate?
Key concepts
- Language attitudes
- Language ideology
- Overt and covert prestige
- Standard language ideology
- Prescriptivism
Key theories
- Language ideology
- Silverstein theorized language ideologies as speakers' rationalizations of language structure and use, mediating between linguistic form and social meaning and shaping how variation is perceived and evaluated.
- Indirect attitude measurement
- Lambert's matched-guise technique elicited evaluative reactions to recorded speech without revealing that the same speaker produced different guises, exposing covert attitudes toward language varieties.
History
Social-psychological measurement of attitudes began with Lambert's 1960 matched-guise experiments; the concept of language ideology was developed in linguistic anthropology by Silverstein and others from the late 1970s, broadening the field beyond individual attitudes to cultural belief systems.
Debates
- Attitudes versus ideologies
- Scholars debate the relationship between individually measured attitudes and the collective, often implicit language ideologies studied in linguistic anthropology, and how the two levels should be integrated.
Key figures
- Michael Silverstein
- Wallace Lambert
- James Milroy
Related topics
Seminal works
- silverstein1979
- lambert1960
- milroy1985
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between a language attitude and a language ideology?
- A language attitude is an individual's evaluation of a variety or its speakers, while a language ideology is a broader, culturally shared system of beliefs that links language to social identity, value, and power and underlies many such attitudes.