5. Language Attitudes: Key Terms

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module and the following one, we explore language attitudes. Here, we focus on: (i) what we mean when we use the term 'attitudes', including the concept of attitude objects; (ii) the three components of language attitudes: cognition, affect and behaviour; and (iii) the question of where language attitudes come from, including the inherent value hypothesis, the imposed norm hypothesis, and the social connotations hypothesis.

Course

In this course, Dr Chris Montgomery (University of Sheffield) explores accent and dialect variation, and also attitudes to accent and dialect variation. In the first module, we introduce some of the key terms associated with accent and dialect, including 'accent' and 'dialect' themselves, but also 'sociolect' and 'idiolect'. After that, in the second module, we think about the various components that constitute an accent or dialect, which is followed in the third module by a listening exercise. In the fourth module, we explore Multicultural London English (MLE) and Multicultural British English (MBE), before turning in the fifth and sixth modules to consider attitudes to language, particularly in relation to education, employability and public shaming. In the seventh and final module, we introduce the a branch of linguistics called language regard, with a particular focus on perceptual dialectology.

Lecturer

Dr Chris Montgomery is Senior Lecturer in Dialectology at the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on non-linguists’ perceptions of language variation, focusing in particular on real-time reactions to regional speech, and especially which features naïve listeners respond to. He is also interested in the wider field of folk linguistics and language attitudes. His recent publications include (as co-editor) Language and a Sense of Place: Studies in Language and Region (2017) and Cityscapes and Perceptual Dialectology: Global Perspectives on Non-Linguists Knowledge of the Dialect Landscape (2016).