Group UVAL

Language Attitudes

From a macro-linguistic perspective, it is utterly important to study language attitudes to be able to understand what hides behind language use, that is to say, why do individuals decide, at some moment in their life, to stop speaking their own language. Speakers’ attitudes give us information about the perception, the values and stereotypes that are socially attributed to a particular language. These values help us to discover and determine the speakers’ linguistic motivations.

It is obvious that languages, in themselves, are not depositary of any value, and that language stereotypes in fact represent social stereotypes. A language’s value is worth the social group who speaks it. A language has got attraction power if those people who speak it have purchasing power, have a socially good position and are able to influence on society. If people give up speaking a language, this is because it is associated with the most disadvantaged social groups, with economic backwardness and a low educational level.

Moreover, the study of language attitudes within a language normalisation context helps to evaluate the immediate effects of the measures applied in language planning. Attitudes precede facts, and in this sense, they foresee the use of languages in the future.

Our work is a follow-up of the research on language attitudes in the Valencian Country conducted at the end of the nineties. The outstanding demographic, social and political changes which have shaken Valencian society in the last ten years have caused several language changes, crucial to the future of the Valencian language. At present, we are conducting a real-time study, which involves returning to the same scenario in order to apply the same techniques to the analysis of the speech of individuals with similar characteristics, and observe the kind of changes taking place and their predictable influence on the future of the language.