1. LANGUAGE & ATTITUDES

2. Hello. My name XXX. I doings business in Islamabad
Hello. My name XXX. I doings business in Islamabad. I like driving music n swim i hate lier and selfish people and like true sensear straghtfarowerd people like u. i want u "frandship". I wANa Chat WIth You PLeASE RePlY mE
We may judge a person’s background, character, and intentions based simply upon the person's language

3. Language Attitude
Attitude is something an individual has which defines or promotes certain behaviors.
Although attitude is individual, but it has origins in collective behavior.
The feelings people have about their own language or the language of others.
(Crystal 1992)

4. Language Attitude Two types Attitude towards the language itself.
Attitude towards speakers of a particular language.

5. Previous Attitude toward Attitude Studies
Before the 1960's, attitudes about language not seen as important; the behaviorist approach to language study saw language as behavior, not as cognitive or mental activity and anything psychological was denounced as mentalism.
Or, study of attitude (esp. toward non-standard language) was seen as dignifying stereotypes and popularizing `unscientific' ideas about language; best to leave this alone. Pseudo-egalitarianism: ignore it and it'll go away.

6. Change of Attitude toward Attitude Studies
In early 1960's in French Canada, beginning of a change. Study of bilingualism, immersion schooling (St. Lambert experiment), led to an interest in attitude change i.e., to see whether changing schooling patterns (bilingual schooling etc.) led to a change in outlook among dominant sectors of society toward minority sector (i.e. French Canadians).
Lambert et al.(Lambert, W. E., R.C. Hodgson, R.C. Gardner and S. Fillenbaum 'Evaluational Reactions to Spoken Language.' Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60: ) 1960 developed the matched guise technique:

7. Speakers are chosen who can pass as native in two different varieties (e.g. English and French) and are recorded speaking a short paragraph in both languages. Same content in both paragraphs (English is a translation of the French) so the only variable is the language. If there are 5 speakers, there are 10 `guises' and these are presented to subjects as if they are different speakers.

8. Subjects are asked to rank the different `speakers' on a number of different personality traits that the subjects think they can detect from the voices. Such traits as:
Height
Looks
Intelligence
Dependability
Leadership
Sociability
Likeability
Self-confidence
Character

9. Outcome: Both English and French subjects rank the English `guises' higher on certain traits; each group differs in some ways on other traits, but there is consistency from both groups on the higher ranking of English guises on the above traits; other traits (religiosity, kindness) were ranked higher for French guises by French S's.
After this initial study, this technique was applied to other sociolinguistic situations involving other varieties of language, e.g. AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) and SAE (Standard American English), Chicano English and SAE, Israeli Hebrew as spoken by Arabs vs. Israeli Hebrew as spoken by Jews, etc. etc.

10. Other traits or characteristics could also be asked about: what kind of job should this person (or would be this person be likely to) have:
Television personality
Executive Secretary
Receptionist
Switchboard Operator
Sales person
Factory Worker
Construction Worker
none of these

11. Anecdotal, Autobiographical, Fictional
Often autobiographical accounts of growing up bi- or multilingual reveal attitudes, perhaps even deep personal trauma, involving some variety of language.
Consider this (fictional) account by Jamaica Kincaid, from her short-story Xuela (New Yorker, 1994), told from the point of view of a young girl who has just come to live with her father and stepmother, somewhere in the Caribbean:

12. This is a quote from a short story by Jamaica Kincaid entitled Xuela (New Yorker May 9, 1994, pg. 90.)
I sat down on the bed. My heart was breaking; I wanted to cry, I felt so alone. I felt in danger. I felt threatened; I felt as each minute passed that someone wished me dead. My father's wife came to say goodnight, and she turned out the lamp. She spoke to me then in French patois; in his presence she had spoken to me in English. She would do this to me through all the time we knew each other, but that first time in the sanctuary of my room, at seven years old, I recognized this as an attempt on her part to make an illegitimate of me, to associate me with the made-up language of people regarded as not real---the shadow people, the forever humiliated, the forever low.

13. Can Language be immoral?
Prescriptivism (p.33)
The belief that we have no business speaking our language in the way that seems natural to us, but that instead we deliberately change our language to make it conform to the regulations laid down by some group of self-appointed experts—no matter how ignorant or crazy those regulations might appear.
Linguists, in great contrast, reject prescriptivism in favor of descriptivism, the policy of describing languages exactly as they are found to be spoken

14. Language change plays a major role
Hopefully, we’ll be there in time for lunch. (p.34)
‘Hopefully’ is a newly introduced adverb

15. Language purism
The hostility to loan words from other languages is called purism.

16. On talking proper
Norman said in class, “He don’t know that” and the teacher quickly corrected “He doesn’t know that”. “But it don’t sound right!” said Norman
The existence of an agreed standard form, learned by all educated English-speakers, makes it easier for all these people to talk to one another.

17. Language attitudes affected by:
Group solidarity
Stereotypes
Intergroup relations
Social Status
Ethnicity

18. The Window

19. A young couple moves into a new neighborhood.
The next morning, while they are eating breakfast, the young woman sees her neighbor hang the wash outside. . 19

20. Her husband looked on, but remained silent.
That laundry is not very clean, she said, she doesn’t know how to wash correctly.
Perhaps she needs better laundry soap.
Her husband looked on, but remained silent.
Every time her neighbor would hang her wash to dry, the young woman would make the same comments. 20

21. About one month later, the woman was surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband:
Look! She has learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this. 21

22. I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows!
The husband said:
I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows! . 22

23. And so it is with life: What we see when watching others, depends on the purity of the window through which we look.
Before we give any criticism, it might be a good idea to check our state of mind and ask ourselves if we are ready to see the good rather than to be looking for something in the person we are about to judge. . . 23