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Attitudes to language — the beliefs, feelings and evaluations people hold about different varieties and, crucially, about the people who speak them — sit at the heart of sociolinguistics and tie this whole module together. This lesson examines the foundational prescriptivism–descriptivism debate, the concept of standard language ideology (Lippi-Green; Milroy and Milroy), the methods used to measure attitudes (the matched-guise technique and perceptual dialectology), the distinction between overt and covert prestige, and the real-world consequences of linguistic prejudice. It is among the richest possible bases for the Paper 2 Section A essay (Language Diversity and Change, 2h30, 100 marks, 40%; one 30-mark evaluative essay), precisely because attitudes connect to accent, class, gender, ethnicity, technology and World Englishes alike.
Key Definition: Language attitudes are the evaluative reactions — positive or negative — that people hold towards varieties, accents, dialects and styles. The central sociolinguistic finding is that these attitudes are socially learned, not linguistically justified: they reflect judgements about the social groups associated with a variety, not properties of the variety itself.
The deepest divide in the study of language is between prescriptive and descriptive stances.
Key Definition: Prescriptivism lays down rules for "correct" usage, on the assumption that some forms are inherently superior. It treats non-standard usage as error and urges adherence to the standard.
The tradition has deep eighteenth-century roots, and a little history clarifies why prescriptivism took the shape it did. The eighteenth century was an "age of correctness," anxious to regularise and dignify English as a fit rival to Latin and French. Robert Lowth (1762), in A Short Introduction to English Grammar, prescribed rules such as not splitting infinitives, not ending sentences with prepositions and not using double negatives — many imported wholesale from Latin and alien to English's actual structure (the double-negative ban, for instance, rests on a spurious analogy with mathematics, "two negatives make a positive," that has nothing to do with how English or most world languages actually work). Lindley Murray (1795) popularised Lowth's rules in English Grammar, the single most widely used textbook of the next century, embedding these prescriptions in the school system. Samuel Johnson (1755), compiling his Dictionary of the English Language, standardised spelling and definitions; revealingly, he set out hoping to "fix" the language permanently but concluded in his Preface that change is irresistible and that the lexicographer who imagines he can "embalm his language" is chasing a fantasy — an early, authoritative concession to the descriptivist truth. The crucial analytical point is that these codifying works did not discover the rules of English; they invented many of them and then naturalised them as timeless correctness. Modern prescriptivism survives in style guides (such as Strunk and White, 1959, The Elements of Style), in newspaper usage columns, in the "grammar pedant" of social media, and in perennial public lament about "falling standards."
Key Definition: Descriptivism describes language as it is actually used, without judgements of correctness, treating every variety as a legitimate object of study. It is the orthodoxy of modern academic linguistics — and the stance the AQA examiner expects you to adopt.
Its core principles are that all varieties are rule-governed (non-standard dialects have systematic grammars, not random errors); that language change is natural and inevitable, so attempts to freeze it are futile; that Standard English carries social prestige, not linguistic superiority, having become standard through power, geography and printing rather than inherent logic; and that linguistic judgements are social judgements in disguise — "that accent sounds uneducated" expresses prejudice about a social group, not a fact about phonology.
It is worth being precise about what descriptivism does not claim, because the careless version invites Honey's objection. Descriptivism does not deny that Standard English is socially powerful, nor does it advise against teaching it; it denies only that the standard is linguistically superior. The reconciling position many linguists adopt is an appropriateness model: rather than ranking varieties as right and wrong, it teaches that different situations call for different registers, so that command of Standard English is a high-stakes additional register to be acquired alongside — not instead of — a speaker's home dialect. This bidialectal goal respects the systematicity of non-standard varieties while equipping speakers with the standard that unlocks education and employment, capturing Honey's pragmatic truth without conceding the discredited claim that non-standard speech is inferior. Articulating this model is one of the most effective ways to demonstrate evaluative balance on the topic.
| Dimension | Prescriptivism | Descriptivism |
|---|---|---|
| Non-standard forms | Errors to be corrected | Valid, systematic varieties |
| Language change | Decline | Natural evolution |
| Role of the linguist | Prescribe correct usage | Describe actual usage |
| Standard English | The one correct form | One variety carrying social prestige |
| Key proponents | Lowth, Murray, Strunk & White, Honey | Trudgill, Crystal, Labov, Cameron, Lippi-Green |
Jean Aitchison, in her 1996 BBC Reith Lectures (The Language Web), exposed the faulty thinking behind prescriptivist anxiety by naming three recurring metaphors:
Against the descriptivist consensus stands John Honey, whose Language is Power (1997) is the set text's key prescriptivist voice. Honey argues that Standard English must be explicitly taught because command of it is essential to social mobility, and that a fashionable refusal to "correct" working-class children's language actually disadvantages them by withholding the variety that unlocks education and employment. Honey is widely contested by linguists, but he is invaluable in an essay as a serious counter-voice: he forces the descriptivist to concede the social reality of the standard even while denying its linguistic superiority. Holding Aitchison and Honey in tension is exactly the kind of evaluation the top bands reward.
Key Definition: Standard language ideology is the entrenched belief that a standard variety is inherently superior and that everyone ought to aspire to it. It naturalises a socially constructed norm as if it were objective fact.
Rosina Lippi-Green, in English with an Accent (1997), gave the concept its sharpest formulation, arguing that standard language ideology is sustained by powerful institutions — schools, the media, the entertainment industry — and that it licenses accent discrimination as one of the last "respectable" forms of prejudice. Her analysis of Disney films, for instance, found that villainous or comic characters were disproportionately given stigmatised or foreign-marked accents, quietly teaching audiences to associate certain ways of speaking with untrustworthiness — a mechanism by which the ideology reproduces itself.
James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, in Authority in Language (1985; later editions 1999), provided the most systematic account. They argue that standardisation is a social process, not a linguistic one, established and policed by institutions rather than by any quality of the language; that complete standardisation is impossible, since even Standard English varies and its speakers disagree about points of grammar and pronunciation; that standardisation is therefore a matter of degree (writing more than speech, formal more than informal); and that prescription is a social practice that maintains hierarchy by privileging the variety of the dominant group.
The Milroys document a centuries-old complaint tradition: in every era people insist that standards are falling and that the young speak worse than their elders. The belief is empirically baseless — there is no objective sense in which English has "deteriorated" — yet astonishingly durable. Only the scapegoat changes:
| Period | Complaint | Target |
|---|---|---|
| 18th century | "English is corrupted by foreign words" | French and Latin borrowings |
| 19th century | "The lower classes speak abominably" | Working-class speech |
| Early 20th century | "The wireless is destroying proper English" | Radio |
| Late 20th century | "Television is ruining children's language" | TV, pop culture |
| 21st century | "Texting is destroying literacy" | Digital communication |
The structure is invariant — a lost golden age set against present decline, with a social group or technology to blame — which is itself strong evidence that the complaint expresses social anxiety rather than linguistic observation.
A crucial refinement, drawn from Peter Trudgill's Norwich work (1974), prevents the simplistic conclusion that everyone simply wants to sound "standard."
Key Definition: Overt prestige is the openly acknowledged status attached to the standard, prestige variety — the kind people will publicly admit to admiring. Covert prestige is the hidden, in-group status attached to non-standard forms, signalling toughness, authenticity, masculinity or local solidarity.
Trudgill found that many Norwich speakers — especially working-class men — used more non-standard forms than their actual class position predicted, and in self-report claimed to use non-standard forms even more than they really did. The explanation is covert prestige: non-standard speech carries positive in-group value (loyalty, authenticity) that can outweigh the overt prestige of the standard. This concept is essential because it shows that attitudes are not a single ladder with the standard at the top; varieties are evaluated on two dimensions at once — status/competence (where the standard wins) and solidarity/social attractiveness (where local varieties often win).
Key Definition: The matched-guise technique (Lambert et al., 1960) plays listeners recordings of the same bilingual or bidialectal speaker performing different varieties ("guises") and asks them to rate each guise on personality traits such as intelligence, friendliness and reliability. Because the speaker is constant, any difference in ratings must reflect attitudes to the variety, exposing prejudices respondents would not admit to directly.
Lambert et al. (1960) studied attitudes to English and French in Montreal. Listeners rated the English guises more favourably on competence and status traits — and, strikingly, French-Canadian listeners rated the French guises lower even on warmth, having internalised the lower social standing of French in that context. The lesson is foundational: attitudes attach to the social group, not the language, and members of a stigmatised group may absorb negative judgements of their own variety.
Howard Giles (1970) applied the technique in Britain and found a consistent hierarchy: RP rated highest for competence and intelligence; regional accents such as Yorkshire and Scottish rated high for friendliness and sincerity but lower for competence; and certain urban accents rated low across most positive traits. The competence/solidarity split maps neatly onto overt and covert prestige, and the consistency across listener groups shows these attitudes are culturally shared rather than idiosyncratic.
It is worth being explicit about why the matched-guise design is so persuasive as evidence, because that reasoning is itself examinable. The technique's power lies in its control: because a single speaker produces every guise, the recordings are matched for voice quality, pitch, content and delivery, so the only variable that changes is the accent or language itself. Any systematic difference in how listeners rate the guises therefore cannot be attributed to the individual speaker and must reflect attitudes attached to the variety — and, since the variety carries no intrinsic intelligence or warmth, to the social group it indexes. This is the cleanest available demonstration that language attitudes are socially constructed rather than responses to real properties of speech. Where a question asks how we know attitudes are prejudice rather than fact, the matched-guise logic is the answer to reach for.
| Strength of matched-guise | Limitation |
|---|---|
| Reveals unconscious attitudes that self-report misses | Artificial setting may not predict real-interaction behaviour |
| Controls for the speaker (same person, different guises) | Needs speakers who can convincingly produce multiple varieties |
| Replicable and widely used cross-culturally | Strips accent of other real-world cues (appearance, dress, context) |
| Has produced robust, consistent findings | A forced rating scale may flatten complex, ambivalent attitudes |
Key Definition: Folk linguistics studies what non-linguists believe about language; perceptual dialectology is one of its methods, asking ordinary people to draw maps of where they think dialects are spoken and to rate them for "correctness" and "pleasantness."
Dennis Preston (1996) pioneered this approach in the USA. He found that respondents from the North rated their own speech as "correct" and Southern speech as pleasant but incorrect, while Southerners often rated Northern speech as more correct than their own — again internalising the prestige hierarchy — and New York City speech was widely judged both incorrect and unpleasant. The value of Preston's work is to show how deeply standard language ideology is embedded in ordinary intuition: even speakers of stigmatised varieties frequently believe their own speech is "wrong." It also separates the two evaluative axes — "correctness" (status) and "pleasantness" (solidarity) — that the matched-guise studies reveal.
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