The large-scale attitudinal investigation presented in this paper aimed at, firstly, obtaining comparable data on social values of language variation under two methodologically different conditions: the participants being... [ view full abstract ]
The large-scale attitudinal investigation presented in this paper aimed at, firstly, obtaining comparable data on social values of language variation under two methodologically different conditions: the participants being unaware of linguistic purposes of the research and subsequently being informed of it. Secondly, it aimed at testing whether the two layers of awareness when assessing dialectal vs standard speech would operate with two different language-ideological systems. The theory was developed by Copenhagen scholars whose numerous experimental studies proved that, for instance, hiding from the participants that they actually were assessing language differences would yield subconscious positivity towards officially downgraded varieties which, in turn, might explain why those varieties are spreading in usage (cf. Kristiansen 2009, 2011).
The investigation closely followed the design of the Danish research. Speaker evaluation experiments, including rating of language varieties and allocation of the played voices to given geographic localities, were carried out in 23 secondary schools in 8 regions of Lithuania, covering 1451 pupils in total. In my presentation, I provide a more detailed description of the data gathering procedure and show how language awareness of the informants was controlled as well as discuss the obtained conscious and subconscious evaluations of Lithuanian standard and dialectal speech variation. Regularity of findings, i.e. the overall tendency in all research sites to overtly valorize local dialects but subconsciously to downgrade dialectal voices, supports the theory that language awareness indeed affects the outcome of value assignment to language variation. The study points to the existence of different language assessment schemes depending on the consciousness of the judges. Furthermore, it has been noticed that association of the judged speakers’ origin with either central or peripheral locality may evoke place-connected stereotypes (cf. Garrett et al. 2005) and thus influence the subconscious attribution of social meaning to the voices.
References
Garrett, Peter, Angie Williams, Betsy Evans. 2005. Accessing social meanings. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 37, 37–54.
Kristiansen, Tore. 2009. The macro-level social meanings of late-modern Danish accents. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 41 (1), 167–192.
Kristiansen, Tore. 2011. Attitudes, ideology and awareness. In The Sage handbook of sociolinguistics. London: Sage Publications, 265–279.
