LANGUAGE ATTITUDE

The Meaning of Language Attitude
People’s perceptions, actions, and reactions towards languages or towards the people using them can be defined as language attitudes. The notion of language attitude has become vital in understanding the concept of speech community, which is a group of speakers who share a set of social attitude toward language. In general there are positive or negative language attitudes. When we hold a perception that people who can speak English well are smart or intellectual, we have a positive attitude to English as well as to the speakers.
Some language-attitudes studies are strictly limited to attitudes toward the language itself. However, most often the concept of language attitudes includes attitudes towards speakers of a particular language; if the definition is even further broadened, it can allow all kinds of behavior concerning language to be treated (e.g. attitudes toward language maintenance and planning efforts) (Fasold 1984: 148).
Attitudes are crucial in language growth or decay, restoration or destruction: the status and importance of a language in society and within an individual derives largely from adopted or learnt attitudes. An attitude is individual, but it has origins in collective behavior. Attitude is something an individual has which defines or promotes certain behaviors. Although an attitude is a hypothetical psychological construct, it touches the reality of language life. Baker stresses the importance of attitudes in the discussion of bilingualism. Attitudes are learned predispositions, not inherited, and are likely to be relatively stable; they have a tendency to persist. However, attitudes are affected by experience; thus, attitude change is an important notion in bilingualism. Attitudes vary from favorability to unfavorability. Attitudes are complex constructs; e.g. there may be both positive and negative feelings attached to, e.g. a language situation (Baker 1988:112- 115).
When studying language attitudes, the concept of motives is important. Two basic motives are called instrumental and integrative motives. If L2 acquisition is considered as instrumental, the knowledge in a language is considered as a "passport to prestige and success". The speaker/learner considers the speaking/learning of English as functional (Ellis 1991: 117). On the other hand, if a learner wishes to identify with the target community; to learn the language and the culture of the speakers of that language in order to perhaps be able to become a member of the group, the motivation is called integrative. In generally, research has proved the integrative motivation to have been more beneficial for the learning of another language (Loveday 1982: 17-18). On the other hand, Gardner & Lambert, for instance, have found out that where the L2 functions as a second language (i.e. it is used widely in the society), instrumental motivation seems to be more effective. Moreover, motivation derived from a sense of academic or communicative success is more likely to motivate one to speak a foreign/second language (Ellis 1991: 118).
Measuring Language Attitude
A language attitude can be positive or negative. In reality, some people may also hold a neutral attitude. To measure someone’s attitude towards a language or its speakers, there are two methods to be applied, namely direct and indirect methods.
a. Direct method
A direct method is a method used in measuring language attitudes by asking questions in an interview or by giving a questionnaire to fill in by some respondents. In this method an interviewer asks questions to which the responses will directly state the interviewer’s language attitude.
b. Indirect method
An indirect method is a method to measure someone’s language attitude. This method is applied in the way that the participants are not aware that their attitudes are being measured.
Factor Influencing Language Attitude
Several factors may influence a language attitude. In most studies are:
a. The Prestige and power of the language
b. Historical background of nations
c. The Social and traditional factors
d. The language internal system
Attitudes in Language Learning
Learners’ attitudes towards the language being learned have been researched many times by language teachers and psychologists. Most of the researchers agreed that favorable (positive) attitude towards the target language will affect more positive result in the learning. In contrast, negative view to the language being learned will be more likely to cause negative result in the study. Based on the researches done in the context of language learning two types of language attitude are distinguished, namely integrative and instrumental language attitude.
a. Integrative language attitude
An integrative language attitude is an attitude which is characterized with some desires and behaviors of the learners to integrate themselves with the language being learned. Learners with this attitude not only learn a language to have a proficiency in it, but also wish to know, imitate, or adapt themselves to the culture related to the native speakers of the language.
b. instrumental language attitude
An instrumental attitude is identified when the learners study a language in order to fulfill only material needs, but has not the need of being part of the culture related to the language. Students who are less motivated in practicing the languages outside the classroom are often less in interested in understanding the culture of the native speakers of the language. They never have an interested in reading books, magazines, or watching a movie in which the language is used.
Attitudes Towards Language Uses
People may express their judgments towards use of a particular language in positive attitude or a negative one, a positive language attitude is followed with positive actions, whereas a negative language attitude is followed with negative ones. One of the most traditional language attitudes is the reaction directed towards the use of taboo word and swearwords.
Almost in every language there are people who believe that certain words are supposed to be used only in particular situations (taboo words). In English for example, word such as Christ or God are considered highly, therefore only uttered in certain contexts. Nowadays words such as fuck, shit, damn, and hell are used very often in swearing and regarded to be less strong than around twenty years ago. However, others may show different attitudes; the used of such words in public places is still considered as shocking.
Attitude towards language users
Attitudes towards a language are often confounded with attitudes towards the users. The experiment using the ‘matched-guise’ described before revealed that speakers’ personalities had been judged based on their utterances. Thus, from the study, the English speakers were said to be better, dependable, more ambitious, and more intelligent while the French speakers were pointed to be more humorous.
A negative attitude towards the user of English phrase you know in TV talk shows has been reported in New Zealand. According to the report, by repeating the phrase, the users were said to be of lower class. Attitude towards language users may be also related to political or social sentiment. Some Indonesian people used to show negative attitude towards those who imitated (the second president) Soeharto’s idiolect.
Code crossing
Code-crossing is a term applied by scholars in studying people’s attitudes towards language uses. The term is used to describe the attitude towards uses of a language or a variety of it by a speaker who is supposed to not use it. Thus, a code-crosser is someone who is not regarded as a member of a group of a speech community but trying to speak in the code used among the members. When a student learning to speak English is using English swearwords (God damn it, piss off, shit) during conversations with (or just a presence of) native speakers of English, he (she) can be perceived to be claiming memberships of the English speaking group.
In a studied conversation between a white man and an Afro-American woman, the woman was spotted to speak in a way that white women usually do. The afro-American was then judged to be crossing (to claim the membership of the white women group) when the white man was found by the women to use a word normally used among the AAVE speakers, he was too accused for showing the same attitude.
People may cross languages consciously to prioritize similarities in class and education. But in some situation this may be challenged when there is a strong manner to reinforce differences. Thus in a conversation a code-crossing is like an exchanges that involves on one hand, the feeling of the listener whether the speaker is regarded to be a member of his (her) social group and on the other hand whether the speaker instead to claim as the member of the listener’s group.
The CAT
The communication accommodation theory (CAT) is a theory that describes a positive or negative language attitude found between communications in their communication. The theory is used to explain especially the attitude shown by an individual speaker toward the listeners in conversation. There are two important sociolinguistics concepts in the theory, namely convergence and divergence.
a. Convergence
Convergence refers to the positive attitude shown by a speaker towards the listener by adjusting the features of his (her) language (the pronunciation, accent, vocabulary, structure) so that he (she) is understood and accepted. A mother’s adjusting her voice during talking with a baby (or child), which is often named as baby talk or motherese, is a form of convergence. In such talking, a mother usually thinks that she needs to use shorter and simpler expressions, higher pitch, slower speed, and does repetition so that what she says is understood straightforwardly.
When the attunement involves increasing similarities between the speaker and their addressee, Giles called this convergence. This may happen at the level of very marked linguistic differences, such as the choice of language, or it may occur more subtly at the level of features such as pitch and speech rate. Speakers are generally reasonably aware of what motivates them to alternate between languages depending on the context and their addressee. However, they may be quite unaware of changes that take place in their prosody, and their realisation of phonological or morph syntactic variables. Convergence with the addressee in choice of language is something that is learnt quite early, and there are obvious functional reasons for this. There’s not much point talking to your Mandarin-speaking grandfather in English if he isn’t going to understand a word you say, and vice versa with your Canadian cousins. However, children also seem to learn that alternating their dialect or accent may make for more effective communication, depending on their addressee. A little boy growing up in Scotland, with non-Scottish parents, was heard to do just this as early as 19 months. Sam was dropped off by a parent at kindergarten one morning and decided to go and look at the books. He walked across the room saying ‘Book, book, book’. The vowel he used in ‘book’ when his parent first put him down was relatively centralized [bυək] – similar to what he would hear at home – but by the time he had crossed the floor of the nursery to the reading corner, he was using a backed and rounded vowel more like the one used by his Scottish caregivers, [buk]. Sam’s kindergarten teachers would certainly understand [bυək], just as his parents would understand [buk], so in this case his convergence on the Scottish norms in his daycare and his parents’ norms at home is unlikely to be motivated by comprehension problems. Accommodation theory would suggest that his behavior shows he associates other social and interactional benefits with speaking more like the different groups of people he moves in and out of. Studies have also shown that people are quite quick to attune their speech rate to their addressee’s. Generally, if we are talking to someone who talks more slowly than we do, we converge by slowing down our own rate of speech. Our interlocutor may also converge by speeding up slightly. This kind of mutual accommodation – some give and take by both parties – is an integral part of the theory.


b. Divergence
In CAT divergence is a concept reflecting a language attitude that takes an opposite direction from the convergence. It refers to a separation shown by a speaker from the listener(s)’s language.
A separation from a group of people who speak the same language is more likely to be found when the separator holds an ‘outsiders’ attitudes towards the group. The separator is demonstrated through the language and often takes place for some different social, political, or cultural backgrounds. Thus, in the class of learning Standard English for example, when an Afro-American boy keeps using AAVE for his strong loyalty to his ethnics, in addition to some belief that his variety of a language reflects his ethnic and cultural identity, the boy is diverging. Unlike convergence that seems to be more reasonable, divergence seems to be a rarer language attitude.
Attunement doesn’t always entail convergence. Depending on the circumstances, speakers may decide that their interests are best served by maintaining, or even accentuating, dist inactions between themselves and their interlocutors. This strategy is called divergence. Just as convergence in choice of language can facilitate comprehension, divergence in language choice can serve as a shield. For instance, in a report that tourists were being ripped off on visits to Prague, the journalist mentioned waiting staff that ‘suddenly lose their ability to speak previously excellent English when questioned by foreigners about what they paid for’ (Krosnar 2005). Divergence at the level of accent can be equally functional. An American who has lived outside of the United States for many years says that she plays up her American accent, diverging from the locals, when she wants sympathy, or sometimes when she wants better service. So, for instance, if a police officer challenges her for stopping in a ‘No Parking’ zone, she replies in a broad accent suggesting she is perhaps a tourist and hopes it will make the police officer decide giving her a ticket isn’t worth it. Similarly, she trades off the stereotype of Americans being vociferous complainers if service isn’t good by accentuating her accent when she feels that the service she is getting isn’t efficient or prompt. And there are less Machiavellian functions to divergence. People may diverge linguistically from their interlocutors in order to accentuate differences if the comparison will foster positive feelings about their in group. Jokes are often made about how touchy Canadians and New Zealanders are if they are mistaken for Americans or Australians (respectively). A strong reaction accentuating their pride in being a Canadian or a New Zealander can be strengthened by the use of marked or unique features of their accent. In the previous chapter we considered some examples of divergence, and these showed that the reasons why individuals might diverge are often related to their perceptions of and attitudes towards a group, as well as to individual members of that group. Our discussion of divergence illustrates the point made by social identity theory, namely that personal and group identities fall on a scale and are inherently blurred.