In this section, we begin a discussion of how individuals negotiate their way through everyday interactions by selecting among the linguistic varieties they know. They do this against the backdrop of the different values that different languages have in the linguistic marketplace and the unconscious recognition that different linguistic practices are marks of social identity. In this chapter, we only discuss those models and studies that most directly have to do with expressions of attitudes directed more toward groups than toward negotiating interactions with individuals. These are models most associated with social psychologists. In the next chapter, we devote much more attention to choices in interpersonal interactions, choices, admittedly, that can hardly not involve attitudes or ideologies.
We look at language attitudes across groups through three models devel-oped by social psychologists. When we wrote about language maintenance and shift in chapter 4, we introduced the first model, ethnolinguistic vitality.
The basic idea behind this model is that researchers can predict whether a group will maintain its language on the basis of measurements of a group’s attitudes about itself. A second model is implied in the matched guise test.
This is a test conducted under experimental conditions (in a laboratory, not in everyday situations) that claims to measure the attitudes that test subjects hold about speakers of the languages used by speakers in the experiment. The idea is that the attitudes that subjects express in the experiment reflect attitudes that are held by people in general in the community. Finally, we consider a third model, Communication Accommodation Theory, as it applies to groups.
This theory used to be called Speech Accommodation Theory. And for con-venience, we’ll just call it Accommodation Theory.
5.6.1 Ethnolinguistic vitality
Ethnolinguistic vitality was introduced more than 25 years ago as an umbrella to explain why groups maintain or shift from their languages (Giles, Bourhis, and Taylor, 1977). They formalized their ideas as ethnolinguistic identity theory. Up until today, ethnolinguistic vitality is the construct most often used in discussions of the attitudes of groups toward how their own language is holding up in competition with other languages in the community. The basic notion is that ethnolinguistic vitality has a cognitive basis. That is, ethno-linguistic vitality refers to the mental image that a group has of itself, and the
assumption is that groups with little ethnolinguistic vitality are likely to dis-appear as entities, while those with high ethnolinguistic vitality are likely to survive, and even thrive, as groups.
Two notions of this vitality developed, one based on objective measures (things that can be counted) and the other on more subjective measures (atti-tudes). But under both types of vitality, status depends on comparisons that a group makes between itself and other groups.
5.6.1.1 Objective ethnolinguistic vitality
Researchers “operationalized” ethnolinguistic vitality by arguing that the extent to which a group has a positive ethnolinguistic identity can be measured with various objective factors. These factors include such measures as the size of the group in a given territory, institutional support (e.g. support in the schools, official interactions), and the number and type of domains in which the group’s language is used.
Obvious examples of languages showing low vitality are those that have small numbers of speakers and little or no community support system or much, if any, official support. These include many indigenous languages in parts of Central and South America, especially those with small numbers of speakers and little or no official support. (Official support includes such practices as using a language as a medium of instruction in schools, giving it status in the courts, etc.) In contrast, consider two examples showing strong vitality. First we look at Korean as spoken by Korean immigrants in the United States as a case show-ing a specialized vitality and then look at Welsh in Wales as a case showshow-ing a widespread vitality.
5.6.1.1.1 Korean vitality in the United States
Even though there are many Korean immigrants living in the United States, the Korean language has little “presence” in the lives of the average American.
Few Americans even hear it spoken and wouldn’t recognize it (as Korean) if they did hear it. Further, Korean has little official standing; that is, it isn’t used in government offices, street signs aren’t in Korean, etc. Certainly, it is not used in public interactions, nor do Koreans expect non-Koreans to show an interest in learning it.
But at least in the larger urban areas where there are large Korean commun-ities, Korean definitely has vitality in the lives of Koreans. In these areas, speakers have a number of support groups (e.g. Saturday school to teach Korean to the community’s children, Korean churches with large member-ships). Further, in these same urban areas (e.g. New York, Chicago, and parts of California), Korean is a subject in some high schools and in some element-ary schools. In 1988, Korean was studied by 2,000 students. Korean is even one of the languages that can be chosen on the second part of the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT II). A number of foreign languages fall in one of the five
general subject areas on SAT II. In 2001, over 3,000 students applied to take the Korean test. Factors such as these increase the vitality of any language.
Why all this vitality? Doesn’t the normal “third-generation rule” apply to Korean immigrants? As you’ll remember, by the third generation, children in many immigrant families no longer speak the L1 of their parents. How does it happen that third-generation Korean-Americans speak Korean, and why? First, if they don’t learn it at home as small children, at least some Korean-Americans are choosing to study Korean in high schools in at least nine states. Where will they use it? There are a number of Korean businesses with offices in New York (or other American cities) and in Korea itself that want to hire graduates who are bilingual in Korean and English. Such graduates would live, at least for a time, in either the US or Korea. Korea is basically a monolingual nation, but it has a formidable place in the world’s economic markets. Thus, we see that a language that we would expect to die out in the US really has quite a bit of vitality, but a specialized vitality.
5.6.1.1.2 Welsh vitality in the United Kingdom
While Welsh in Wales (in the west of Great Britain) does not have a totally secure future, it now has an established support system that is the sort that leads to strong positive ethnolinguistic vitality and a “presence” in the British Isles that cannot be denied. Welsh was spoken in Wales before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the British Isles. Gradually it was used less and less, but there was a revival in the mid-nineteenth century when the Welsh national anthem was written. In the aftermath of World War I and the Great Depres-sion (mainly the 1930s) in the twentieth century, Welsh almost died out. But a Welsh Language Society was formed in these years, agitating in various ways for recognition of Welsh as a legitimate language in Wales. Finally, the Welsh Office was established as a separate government department in the United Kingdom in 1964 and in 1970 responsibility for primary and secondary educa-tion was transferred to the Welsh Office.
Since then, involvement of the schools and the media has sparked a true revival. The Welsh schools movement is especially vigorous in the primarily Welsh-speaking non-industrial areas. Today there should be enough bilingual primary schools (Welsh and English) available to allow parents the choice of a main language with the other language also used. In secondary schools, Welsh is taught as a second language where English is the main medium of instruc-tion. Overall, local control prevails and each county fine-tunes its policy to fit its needs. Also, the Welsh Language Act of 1967 gave Welsh “equal validity”
with English in legal proceedings in Wales. Wales receives national radio and television broadcasts in Welsh. The rise in popularity of Celtic (Welsh is a Celtic language) music affected youth sentiment, too. Today, while Korean in the US is somewhat invisible to non-Koreans, Welsh is very visible in Britain and beyond.
5.6.1.2 Subjective ethnolinguistic vitality
When subjective ethnolinguistic vitality is studied, the emphasis is on a group’s perceived status and this status may differ from the status that would be based on actual conditions. Various researchers have developed Subjective Vitality Questionnaires. These seek to measure group member perceptions about the status of their group in relation to other groups. Some of the ques-tions have to do with objective measures (such as institutional support), but the questions ask what measures the speakers think exist; they don’t actually consider what the measures are.
Bourhis and Sachdev (1984) discuss group attitudes in terms of such ethnolinguistic vitality. Allard and Landry (e.g. Allard and Landry, 1992) have their own measures that include ways to assess beliefs about what a group thinks that its legitimate vitality should be as well as what it thinks about its future vitality. Many of the first studies dealt with French-English relations in Canada, but today everything about vitality among groups – whether they are indigenous or immigrants – all over the globe are studied.
5.6.2 Matched guise tests
When Wallace Lambert developed the matched guise test in the 1960s, his object was to study inter-ethnic attitudes in Montreal (where he taught). His research question was, how do French and English Canadians (francophones and anglophones) view each other? He believed that public statements and replies to questionnaires about this issue did not get at the views that people really held.
The premise of the studies he and his associates did (and the premise behind the many later studies done employing this test) is that hearing a person speaking language X will trigger an expression of the attitudes a judge has about speakers of language X. The attitudes studied refer to both abilities (e.g. competent), attributes (e.g. educated) and personality traits (e.g. friendly, loyal, ambitious).
The “trick” in these studies is that the judge hears the same person speaking the two different languages under study (i.e. the person has a “guise” or “false appearance” as only a speaker of language X when, in fact, he or she also is heard speaking language Y). The recordings of the same person in the two guises are interspersed with other recordings so that the judges will not real-ize they are hearing the same person twice. In the initial experiments, judges thought they were hearing an anglophone Canadian speaking English and a francophone Canadian speaking French.
After hearing the speakers, the judges rate the speakers along a number of dimensions, as mentioned above. That is, the study is supposed to test the judges’ privately held attitudes about speakers of two different language vari-eties spoken in the same community. In Lambert’s initial study the anglophone Canadians rated the same speaker in the anglophone version more favorably on half of the traits, including abilities and attributes such as “intelligent” and
“educated”. This study was done at a time when French Canadians were just beginning to assert the value of their group and eventually demand special rights, especially in Québec. For this reason, it’s not surprising that the franco-phone judges not only went along with the anglofranco-phone judges in rating the anglophone version very favorably on a number of traits, but they actually favored the anglophone on ten out of the 14 traits.
A major theoretical value of the matched guise technique is that the initial study, but also most further studies around the world, show that judgments cluster around two sets of traits: (high) status and solidarity. In some cases, judges rate the voice that is associated with their own group favorably re-garding the solidarity traits, but in all studies the judges consistently rate more favorably on the ability and attribute traits the voice associated with the lan-guage variety spoken by people with power and prestige in the society. That is, there is a split between the types of attitudes judges hold about speakers from different groups. In-group speakers may be rated as “honest” or “friendly”, but out-group speakers (if they are from the group dominating in high-status positions) are rated as “educated” and”competent”.
5.6.2.1 Matched guise tests and inter-group attitudes
More of the studies that followed Lambert’s initial work looked more at differ-ences in judgments about dialects of the same language than at different rat-ings for different languages. One study using the matched guise technique that does deal with different languages is that by Woolard and Gahng (1990) of changing cross-group attitudes in Barcelona, the capital of the Catalonian autonomous region of Spain. Recall from our earlier references to Barcelona that Catalan, a language closely related to Castilian (the standard dialect of Spanish), is the local language. Under the regime of Franco (1939–75), Catalan was repressed. Further, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 obliges all citizens to know Castilian. But later, the Catalan language became co-official with Castilian in Catalonia under a Statute of Autonomy, and in 1983, the Catalan Parliament passed a law establishing full co-official use of Catalan in a wide number of public uses. For example, Catalan is now the medium of instruction in at least some subjects in many schools and teachers are officially required to know both Castilian and Catalan.
Woolard and Gahng repeated their 1980 study in 1987 to see if all these changes in official policy (and therefore presumably the increase in knowledge and use of Catalan) affected attitudes toward a Catalan speaker. They used the
“matched guise” format with the same stimulus tape recording in both stud-ies. Four young women, two Catalan-dominant and two Castilian-dominant, each read a text of about one minute, once in Catalan and once in Castilian.
Respondents evaluated the speakers, but were unaware they were hearing the same speaker in both languages.
The listeners were secondary school students (N=276 in 1987 and slightly fewer in 1980). They included both male and female and reflected a range of social classes; most were natives of Catalonia, but their parents were not neces-sarily born there. According to the language they used at home, listeners were classed as either Catalan or Castilian speakers or as bilinguals.
Listeners rated the speakers on 14 personal traits that the authors classified in terms of two factors, Solidarity and Status. Ratings under Solidarity included
“likeable” and “generous”, and those under Status included “intelligent” and
“leader-like”.
In a comparison of the data of 1987 and 1980, the most interesting findings are those on the Solidarity dimension because the language used had little effect on the Status dimension. Both times, the Catalan version rated higher in regard to Status. This is not a surprise because Catalonia is a major industrial center and has a higher standard of living than most other parts of Spain.
In contrast to Catalan speakers, Castilian speakers in Catalonia are typically immigrants who hold skilled and semiskilled jobs.
In regard to the Solidarity dimension, patterns did change. True, listeners still gave the highest scores on the Solidarity factor to speakers using their own common in-group language, especially the girls. But, as Woolard and Gahng note, “there has been a loosening of the bond between the Catalan language and native Catalan ethnolinguistic identity. It no longer matters so much to Catalans who speaks Catalan, but rather simply that it is spoken”
(1990: 326). Also, the responses from Castilian-dominant listeners indicated that speaking Catalan in Barcelona was not just for Catalan natives anymore.
When Castilian listeners heard someone who was clearly Castilian-dominant (obvious from the pronunciation), but speaking Catalan, they did not penalize the speaker with lower ratings on Solidarity. This indicates that by 1987, Catalan had lost its label as an ethnic language reserved for Catalan natives.
As the authors put it, “in 1987, being addressed in Catalan had become a part (even if only a small part) of most school-aged Castilian speakers’ day”
(1990: 327).
5.6.2.2 Where evaluations come from
What was important about these studies was that they demonstrated that listeners make evaluations of people based on the language they speak. It didn’t matter whether their judgments coincided with any objective measure-ments or not. True, to some extent they did reflect community norms because at the time of Lambert’s studies in Canada, English had considerably more prestige than French in Canada, especially as a language spoken by persons with the higher-status jobs. But, for example, the more favorable rating for the English guise in terms of “good looks” could hardly be anything but a subjective judgment.
Where do these evaluations come from? Many of them are based on experience with other speakers. That is, if the listener knows that people
“who speak language X” are often people who have Y set of attributes, he or she uses previous experience when encountering a speaker using language X. That is, previous associations with language X are a basis for judging the speaker or what the speaker “means” by using language X in this particular context.
5.6.2.3 Attitudes and validity and reliability of evidence
Attitude tests have been criticized on a number of grounds. Listeners/
consultants may say something on one day when asked about their views toward a language choice, but can we assume that their set of attitudes is constant and unidimensional? One problem with studies involving attitudes toward languages is that the meanings attached to hearing different languages have a number of potential associations. For example, are speakers who seem to be “making an effort” rated more favorably (for whatever reason, but often to speak what is a second language for them when the addressee is a native speaker of that language)? Also, several important questions arise in many attitude studies about listeners: Are they even trying to tell “the truth” or do they give answers that they think the researcher would like, or answers that make them “look good”?
There are some methodological problems with matched guise tests, too. For one thing, such tests imply that listeners hold a constant set of evaluations about a speaker of a given language. In fact, it’s more likely that the social meanings attached to a given language vary with the context in which it’s used.
But these tests did demonstrate what we care about: Listeners can and do evaluate an individual in regard to a number of personal attributes, just from hearing that individual speak language X. And we can go on to say that it’s not just listeners who “know” about these evaluations; so do the speakers themselves.
Studies based on self-reports from speakers have a special problem (as dis-cussed in chapter 3). Whether we researchers like it or not, there is evidence that self-reports about what speakers do are often misleading or downright wrong. For example, Bourhis used self-reports in a survey in Québec in Canada
Studies based on self-reports from speakers have a special problem (as dis-cussed in chapter 3). Whether we researchers like it or not, there is evidence that self-reports about what speakers do are often misleading or downright wrong. For example, Bourhis used self-reports in a survey in Québec in Canada