Language attitudes and language change

This chapter introduces the study of language attitudes in sociolinguistics (the so-called evaluation problem) and looks at how speech variation is perceived and can trigger attitudes in listeners. The chapter focuses on phonetic variation and the use of methods from social psychology to study how variation is indexically linked to social meaning and how such links may in turn shape the dissemination of new variants. Studies highlighting the importance of obtaining measures of implicit language attitudes are reviewed because these have been found in some speech communities to be very different from explicit attitudes and to enable the prediction of the path of linguistic change. Recent adaptations of newer methods from social psychology for use in sociolinguistics are also introduced, and the chapter concludes by summarizing issues that are important to keep in mind when designing language attitude studies for the purposes of studying language change.