The Characteristics Of Language Attitudes

As it has been claimed by Agheyisi and Fishman (1970), language attitudes have been the most indispensable concept in sociolinguistics. Ryan (1982) has defined attitude as “a learned disposition to think, feel and behave toward a person or a class of objects in a particular way”. This interpretation emphasizes the positive and negative emotional responses that attitude embodies, and thus, language attitudes consist of an affective component, and extend to thought and behavior as well. In addition to this, Oppenheim (1982, cited in Garrett 2010) also incorporates cognitive and behavioural elements, but encompasses in his definition more elaboration of the ways in which attitudes are exemplified: a construct, an abstraction which cannot be directly apprehended. It is an essential component of mental life which expresses itself, directly or indirectly, through much more apparent procedures as stereotypes, beliefs, verbal statements or reactions, ideas and opinions, selective recall, anger or satisfaction or some other emotion and in disparate other features of behaviour.

It has been declared by Bauer and Trudgill (1998) the language attitude, that “everyone has an accent except me”. It is supported that accent defines and communicates who we are. Therefore, the differences in speech sounds that the speakers utilize can be perceived in the notion of “own-ness”. As it has been advocated by Bauer and Trudgill (1998) accent is the vehicle which listeners discern through their ears rather than through their eyes to “read”, for instance, where the speaker was born and raised, their gender, and where they might have moved during their life. Thus, it is an undeniable fact that everyone has an accent, which conveys information about the identity and individual history and that implies the case that there are some potential forensic applications. Furthermore, it is supported that the national standard language of a country is considered to be accentless and that non-standard speakers, on the contrary, have accents. Nevertheless, the standard languages have their roots in language varieties that already exist in distinct social groups. (Bauer and Trudgill, 1998) Therefore, there is the assertion that Standard languages represent individuals with more economic and political competence than people who use another accent. The principle of the “co-construction of reality” points out that the differences can be claimed not to occur until people build them. One result of this principle reveals the language attitude that some varieties of languages are socially superior and have more social prestige. In contrast, accents that individuals have heard merely occasionally and do not know very well have been stereotyped and prone to stigma. This is associated with the people’s interpretations of a language’s “correctness” and their attitudes towards language variation of what sounds more pleasant or intelligent. This can be illustrated in a comparison of standard and accented English; in which Ryan (1982) found that Mexican and Anglo- American children downgraded the accented speech relative to Standard English, and strongly preferred the Standard English showing more favorable attitudes towards it.

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As it has been advocated by Ryan (1982) there is the language attitude that some languages are more aesthetically pleasing than others. For instance, Italian sounds are considered to be sophisticated, elegant and lively, and hence, conjure up positive emotions in listeners and generally more pleasing moods in their speakers. On the contrary, German, Arabic and some East-Asian tongues are deemed to be harsh, dour and unpleasant-sounding. The belief which exemplifies this fact is called “inherent value hypothesis”. Proponents of this position support that some languages and accents of them, are inherently more attractive than others. In other words, it is not due to the historical predilections or social conditioning, rather because certain ways of speaking “nicely” are biologically equipped with us. It is for this reason that certain language forms reflect prestige over others and that other languages could not possibly ever gain predominance or become the standard since they are too unpleasant. One of the language scholar and historian has stated that if one were to compare every vowel sound in Standard British English with the corresponding sounds in non-standard accents, any unbiased observer would apparently prefer the former as being the most pleasing and sonorous from. In a previous survey, British people were asked to rate how pleasant it would be to live in various cities and then to rate the pleasantness of the accents of these areas. It has been demonstrated that there was a high correlation between these two evaluations. As it has been supported by Ryan (1982) peoples’ aesthetic judgments and positive or negative language attitudes towards language variety are built on cultural norms and social connotations.

Language attitudes can be examined in both direct and indirect techniques. Direct methods such as interviews or questionnaires measure consciously and deliberately constructed and expressed attitudes. Such direct techniques, however, have been criticized to be susceptible to social desirability or self-flattering strategies. Indirect desirability, conversely, obtain information that is more implicit and less easily accessible through introspection which makes indirect attitude evaluation less subject to the problems mentioned above.

Undoubtedly, the most well-known and commonly used in the indirect measurement tool in language attitude studies is the matched-guise technique. (Agheyisi and Fishman, 1970) The MGT strategy involves the presentation of various audio fragments which are recorded in different language varieties by one and the same speaker. The main idea is that the recorded accents reveal impressions of personality characteristics, which are in fact impressions of different language varieties; to listeners who are unaware of the fact that solely one speaker is involved. The value of utilizing the matched-guise technique rather than more direct measures is that it “appears to reveal judges’ more private reactions to the contrasting group” (Agheyisi and Fishman, 1970). This is valid, however, only if the misleading is successful: that is if participants actually believed that they were reacting to what they thought were different speakers. Nevertheless, the matched-guise technique has attracted a great deal of controversy. It is argued by Garrett (2010) that providing respondents with the repeated content of a reading passage presented by a series of voices may exaggerate the language variations and, make them more salient than they would normally be outside the experimental environment. Moreover, the mimicking – authenticity shortcoming arises here. In some studies, the audio recordings are of just two varieties by bilingual or bi-dialectal speakers. But in studies where speakers produce numerous varieties, the accuracy of the renderings is likely to be reduced. As Preston (2002) has found, there can be many inaccuracies when people are asked to imitate accents, and even if respondents are able to “validate” the voices, they might, however, perceive the voice to be different in some way (p.65). Additionally, the labels used for the audio-recorded regional speech varieties in published reports could sometimes be more specific. For instance, language attitude studies in various areas in Wales have sometimes referred to audio-recordings representing “Welsh English”, and the findings, therefore, demonstrating attitudes to “Welsh English”. Where studies have produced results that differ from those of other studies in Wales, some attention needs to be given to community factors such as the particular regional variety of Welsh English utilized in each study, as well as which communities the respondents are drawn from. Furthermore, another weak point of the matched-guise technique is the differences in meaning between the labels in different languages for the ends of semantic differential scales. Since it is often difficult to find exact or even close equivalents, there will inevitably be some imprecision in comparing responses made by monolingual speakers of different languages in different guises.

To continue with, recent developments in perceptual dialectology have provided a further set of procedures for gathering data on language attitudes, and these procedures are incorporated under the direct approach rubric. In Preston’s view (2002), to study adequately the attitudinal component of the communication competence of ordinary speakers, at least some attention needs to be given to beliefs concerning the geographical distribution of speech, beliefs about standard and affectively preferred language varieties, the degree of difference perceived in relation to surrounding varieties, imitations of other varieties, and anecdotal accounts of how such beliefs and strategies develop and persist. A large proportion of studies have focused on folk perceptions of dialects, using various kinds of map tasks which are known as “draw a map” procedure. Respondents are given a blank map of a country and are asked to draw dialect boundaries around areas where they believe regional speech zones exist. For instance, Montgomery (2012) adopted a perceptual dialectology approach to investigating the North/South divide in the UK. Participants were asked to divide the country into a linguistic North/South and they placed speakers on a map corresponding to where they thought speakers were from. As it is claimed by Garrett et al (2003), this kind of perceptual dialectology study provides into what and where dialect regions actually exist in people’s mind. With regards to the shortcomings of this technique, geographical knowledge is needed. Hence, if participants have not at least the basic geographical information required for this study, then the results would be inaccurate. Furthermore, forced categorization studies, in which listeners are given categories instead of maps, require less reliance on geographical knowledge. However, perceptual categorization task guarantees merely 30% accuracy when dividing speakers into 6 areas. Another drawback is concerned with the notion of “deindividuation” the tendency of respondents to report socially desirable attitudes rather than their own private attitudes, in order to show acquiescence in attitudinal responses by giving the response they assume the researcher wants. In other words, although there may be a gap between what we know to be their behaviour on the other, it may be the case that there is no discord whatsoever between their behaviour and their “real” or dominant attitude is.

On reflection, as it has been declared by Allport (1954 cited in Ryan, 1982), “an attitude is a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related”. The significant aspect of this definition is that attitudes influence individuals’ responses to attitude objects or situations, not that they determine them. This integrated discussion has outlined some language attitudes and some ways in which they can be studied, as well as their shortcomings.