The study of language attitudes has become more topical in recent years following insights from sociolinguistic research, as well as the efforts of sociolinguists to inform the public about the implications of language attitudes on people's lives. Despite these efforts, language-based discrimination and prejudice remain ubiquitous in our societies. The reason might be because ‘deliberative [i.e. conscious] attitudes generally change more easily and at a faster rate than more deeply embedded automatic [i.e. unconscious] attitudes’ (41). This book is, therefore, a timely attempt to explore implicit attitudes (an aspect of language attitudes that has tended to slip under sociolinguists’ radar) and offer further insights into how language attitudes work at the unconscious level. The authors adopt an innovative approach to the study of language attitudes known as ‘implicit measures’, which they argue is a particularly valuable design because implicit measures approaches can reveal people's unconscious/automatic evaluations, which they may be unaware of or unwilling to verbalise. In fact, according to the authors, the book is a response to the growing ‘calls by some sociolinguists to incorporate innovative and fine-grained implicit instruments developed within social psychology into the design of language attitude studies’ (74), especially in studies that aim to determine whether there is evidence of language attitude in progress, such as this one.
Following an extensive evaluation of existing theories and methodologies of language attitude research, and a critical assessment of prior studies, the book makes a case for, and reports, a large-scale study of English nationals’ evaluations of Northern English and Southern English speech in England, a study which ‘compares and contrasts explicit and implicit evaluations, on both status and social attractiveness dimensions, for a range of individual differences’ (51). The study adopted an innovative implicit measure instrument known as Implicit Association Test, as well as a self-report scale, a social dominance orientation scale, and background information measures in order to determine implicit-explicit discrepancy (IED) as indicative of attitude change.
Based on fine-grained analyses undergirded by robust statistical techniques, the study makes a wide range of interesting revelations regarding the attitudes of English nationals towards Northern English and Southern English speech. While some of its findings confirm those of previous research (such as that ‘self-report attitudes were significantly more positive towards Southern English speech on the status dimension, while in terms of social attractiveness they afforded significantly higher levels of favourability towards Northern English speech’, 102), there were many other unique outcomes, especially with regard to the implicit attitudes. For instance, it was ‘discovered that the older English participants expressed a much stronger implicit bias in favour of Southern English speech in terms of social attractiveness when compared to the younger participants’ (121). Overall, ‘the results indicated significant levels of implicit-explicit attitudinal discrepancy between the English nationals’ perceptions of both the status and the social attractiveness of (the speakers of) forms of English used in the north and the south of England’ (172).
Given its innovative approaches, fine-grained and robust analyses, and interesting findings, I invite you to read the book in order to have a fuller picture as masterfully painted by the authors of this discipline-shaping book.
