Attitudes to Language
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH & COMMUNICATIONS
COMMUNICATION STUDIES
ATTITUDES TO LANGUAGE
Language clearly plays a major role in all aspects of society. The most obvious is its social role of allowing people to relate to each other in all facets of their lives: to share information, emotions and ways of life. We use language as a means of navigating our daily lives and it plays an integral role in most of our interactions. Perhaps for this reason, French is regarded as an elegant and romantic language, while German is considered to be guttural. Additionally, ever since mankind evolved into different language communities, it is commonplace for people to adopt various attitudes towards the language(s) spoken by others, as well as towards the dialects of the language they speak. These attitudes are motivated by different factors, including pride in or shame regarding one’s own language, confidence or embarrassment about how one sounds, nationalism and a sense of personal dignity, one’s status and values as well as the prestige some languages are given in international interactions. A well known attitude is the desire for foreign speech patterns; another is the rejection of certain dialects.
People form impressions of your personality, emotional state, geographic origin, education, experiences, age or socioeconomic status from the language you use and the way you use it.
We often witness the amusement of an audience when someone speaks in the creole, for not only does the system of sound evoke laughter, but the assumption that the speaker is an uneducated serf is then made.
Ridicule and contempt for the vernacular, creoles and dialects are common responses from some members of society, even within the Caribbean society, where dialects are rich, strong and the first language. Dialects develop under various circumstances as well as geographical locations and are varieties of languages. A creole could be a dialect within a language.
Because of our
COMMUNICATION STUDIES
ATTITUDES TO LANGUAGE
Language clearly plays a major role in all aspects of society. The most obvious is its social role of allowing people to relate to each other in all facets of their lives: to share information, emotions and ways of life. We use language as a means of navigating our daily lives and it plays an integral role in most of our interactions. Perhaps for this reason, French is regarded as an elegant and romantic language, while German is considered to be guttural. Additionally, ever since mankind evolved into different language communities, it is commonplace for people to adopt various attitudes towards the language(s) spoken by others, as well as towards the dialects of the language they speak. These attitudes are motivated by different factors, including pride in or shame regarding one’s own language, confidence or embarrassment about how one sounds, nationalism and a sense of personal dignity, one’s status and values as well as the prestige some languages are given in international interactions. A well known attitude is the desire for foreign speech patterns; another is the rejection of certain dialects.
People form impressions of your personality, emotional state, geographic origin, education, experiences, age or socioeconomic status from the language you use and the way you use it.
We often witness the amusement of an audience when someone speaks in the creole, for not only does the system of sound evoke laughter, but the assumption that the speaker is an uneducated serf is then made.
Ridicule and contempt for the vernacular, creoles and dialects are common responses from some members of society, even within the Caribbean society, where dialects are rich, strong and the first language. Dialects develop under various circumstances as well as geographical locations and are varieties of languages. A creole could be a dialect within a language.
Because of our