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Everyone speaks a language and everyone has come into contact with another variety of their own or another language. We all notice different accents, we are all aware of “mistakes” that we and others make, and we all make and understand jokes and play games that use language in clever ways. And of course, everyone has heard many language stereotypes throughout their lives; that certain languages are “harder”, that some dialects make people sound “cool”, that certain words are outdated. The way that people use language (particularly young people and women) is a continual object of interest in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television; and, critical to our topic, these commentators are rarely neutral.
This course will do three things: (1) survey common language ideologies (the societal beliefs and stereotypes about language that provide the context in which individual attitudes are negotiated); (2) investigate specific language attitudes (an individual’s beliefs and stereotypes about language that that individual uses to negotiate their identity within the larger context of language ideologies); and (3) explore the most common methods of conducting language attitudes research (i.e. how to get at the real-world implications of these somewhat ethereal topics). We will discuss such higher-level topics as: standard language ideologies; languages as right, resource, or problem; language in education; as well as issues that are relevant to our unique social environment such as: linguistic discrimination; multilingualism; language development; and language policy. |
