Modeling language attitudes: attitudinal measurements and linguistic behavior in two bilingual communities

Tamburelli, Marco, Gruffydd, Ianto ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6242-9411, Breit, Florian and Brasca, Lissander 2025. Modeling language attitudes: attitudinal measurements and linguistic behavior in two bilingual communities. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 10.1177/0261927X251315114

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Abstract

This paper investigates whether attitudinal measures can predict usage in two bilingual communities with radically different language policies. We compare 163 participants’ (ages 24–36) rates of spontaneous language usage to two attitudinal measures among Welsh—English and Lombard—Italian bilinguals. Usage rates are found to correlate with Matched Guise Technique status scores for Lombard and to predict solidarity scores for Welsh. A different picture emerges from the Implicit Association Test, with scores correlating with usage for Welsh but not for Lombard. We link these findings to the radically different levels of sociopolitical support associated with the regional/minority languages and the nature of the two attitudinal measures. Our findings suggest that the utility of different attitudinal measures depends partly on sociopolitical circumstances and on the type of association intrinsically addressed in each measure. These have important implications for both the study of language attitudes and research on language vitality.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Sage
ISSN:	0261-927X
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	13 February 2025
Date of Acceptance:	13 December 2024
Last Modified:	14 Feb 2025 16:35
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/176176

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