Language

Attitude
• For what activities is L1 inadequate?

• For what activities is L2 inadequate?

• Is it good to speak English? Why?

• What is the most useful language in this city?

 Attitude

Attitudes encompass three components:

Cognitive

Affective

Conative

(Mentalist Approach)
• Obiols defines attitude “a mental disposition towards
something”.
• Language attitudes are the feelings that people have
towards their language and language of others.
(Behaviorist approach)
• A speaker’s accent, speech patterns, vocabulary,
intonation, etc. can serve as markers for evaluating that
speaker’s appearance, personality, social status and
character.
• Positive attitude- convergence

• Negative attitude- divergence

 Significance

• Predict a given linguistic behavior

• The choice of a particular language in multilingual

societies
• Language loyalty

• Language prestige

(Obiols 2002)
 Attitudes towards English

• British experiments have shown that speakers of

English with London accent are judged more positively
than speakers with Cockney English.
• Non-standard rated higher on solidarity dimensions

• Standard accents- more competent and higher status

 Categories of Objects of L.A.

• Regionally accented speech style

• Arabic dialects in Egypt
• Dialects in Netherland

• Ethnically accented speech styles

• Black English
• Dutch accented English
• Second/foreign languages/foreign-accented speech
styles/languages for specific purposes (students
learning this language)
• Convergent speech styles/mixed speech styles/linguae
francae
• attitudes of students at the University of Ottawa towards
convergence with French versus maintenance of English
• Gender and age-specific speech styles

• phonetically/lexically/paralinguistically diversified
speech styles
• phoneme /p/ in Arabic is replaced by /b/
• voice quality of American and German speakers
The question then is whether the pre-eminence of English
in the scientific world is occurring at the expense of other
languages of scholarship, existing or potential, and
whether a single privileged language, alone with the
paradigms associated with it, represents a threat to other
ways of thinking and their expression (Phillipson 2003:
80).