This chapter outlines how the discourse analysis of print media can be used to examine language attitudes and discusses the main strengths and limitations of this method. One significant strength lies in the fact that the printed press is an important means by which ideas about language are (re)produced. Analyses of the metalanguage used in the press can therefore be particularly revealing about language attitudes in a given society. An example of a limitation is the fact that print media texts vary enormously in terms of their context and audience. This makes a restricted practice of discourse analysis problematic, but equally too broad a practice may become effectively meaningless. The chapter provides an overview of the main discourse analytical approaches that have been applied to language attitude studies, and then narrows the focus to examine critical discourse analysis (CDA) in particular, outlining its strengths and limitations, giving examples of how it can be used to analyse and interpret data, and discussing key practical issues in planning and designing CDA research. The chapter concludes with a case study evaluating attitudes towards French using a corpus of language columns in French newspapers, thereby exemplifying the main points made in the chapter.

The sociolinguistic situation of the Channel Islands has meant that English has been spoken there alongside the native language, Norman, for several centuries, albeit in a diglossic relationship, with English assuming “High” functions (administration, legislation, education, media, and so forth) and Norman “Low” functions (familiar discourse with family and friends). The fact that, today, all speakers of the three extant varieties of Insular Norman (Jèrriais, Guernesiais, and Sercquiais) are also fluent in English has had far-reaching linguistic consequences in that the Norman spoken in the Channel Islands has diverged from the varieties spoken on the French mainland, and distinctive local varieties of Channel Island English have developed. Based on original data, this chapter provides an overview of the sociolinguistic setting that gave rise to this language contact and discusses some representative examples of contact-induced influence in the lexis, phonology, and morphosyntax of both Channel Island Norman and Channel Island English.

Urban contact dialects emerged in urban settings among locally born young people and can serve as markers of a new, multiethnic urban identity. The chapter brings together instances of such dialects from Europe and Africa, two regions where these phenomena have received a lot of attention from contact-linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. In both settings, local contexts for urban contact dialects are characterised by an openness to multilingual practices. In African contexts, this multilingual perspective is usually also present at the macro level of the larger society; in Europe, the societal context is generally characterized by a more monolingual (and monoethnic) habitus. The comparative perspective adopted here shows that these differences in macro context support different structural and sociolinguistic outcomes, including contact-induced and contact-facilitated change; urban contact dialects taking the form of multilingual mixed languages or new vernaculars of a national majority language; the possible spread of these dialects to become general markers of youth or modernity; and negative public perceptions involving different language-ideological patterns.

If language standardization is understood as a historical process that strengthens a standard norm at the expense of variation, prefixing de- to standardization gives us a notion concerning change in the opposite direction: a progressive weakening of the norm in favour of variation. This is what the chapter discusses: are we experiencing, under the contemporary conditions of Late Modernity, a situation whereby the continued strengthening of the standard norm is being replaced by an incipient weakening? It is argued that the discussion needs to focus on the ideological aspect of the issue. Norway is discussed as an exemplary case of norm weakening, based on evidence that the multiplicity of dialects is more present and accepted in public domains than ever before, as the standard language ideology (tSLI; he belief in a ‘best’ language) has been abandoned: destandardization. In contrast, Denmark is discussed as an exemplary case of continued norm strengthening based on evidence that dialectal variation disappears as SLI changes, but grows stronger than ever before. This latter situation is termed demotization. Other terms are also discussed, including restandardization and vernacularization, which have been proposed in reported work from other countries (including Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, the UK, the USA, New Zealand and Sri Lanka).

Language standardization ‘from above’ occurs in situations in which language authorities seek to disseminate a standardized variety across a speech and writing community. Hence, the crucial aspect of language standardization ‘from above’ is implementation, in Haugen’s terminology. In the history of many European languages, standardization ‘from above’ is a Late Modern phenomenon, closely tied to the rise of standard language ideology in the eighteenth century. In this chapter, we first define language standardization ‘from above’, situating it in the sociohistorical context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Arguing that the sociolinguistic situation at the time can be described as diaglossic, we claim that language standardization ‘from above’ is a top-down effort to reorganize the sociolinguistic condition in terms of standard and non-standard. We then discuss various instruments of implementation, encompassing both private and official language planning activities such as usage guides, language academies, professorships in ‘national’ languages, language laws and educational reforms. Finally, we zoom in on the effects of implementation, distinguishing between discursive and linguistic effects (i.e. changing patterns of language use under the influence of standardization ‘from above’). Our examples are mainly taken from the Dutch situation, while also incorporating examples from English, German, French and Spanish.

This chapter seeks to evaluate how student users of English are viewed beyond the English-as-school-subject curriculum, both in and out of classrooms. In particular, it exposes some of the tangible effects of ontologies of English in the education context, with important implications for education policy. Despite extensive scholarly work in Applied Linguistics offering positive reconceptualisations of language use in a variety of approaches, such as World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca, and translanguaging (e.g. Creese and Blackledge, 2010; Hornberger and Link, 2012; García and Wei, 2014; García and Kleyn, 2016), the notion of a ‘target’ for the learning and teaching of ‘good English’ for most monolingual mainstream teachers in the United Kingdom remains based on the norms of Standard English, or N-English (to adopt the categorisation terminology proposed by Hall, this volume). For more discussion on the nature of linguistic norms, see Harder (this volume). In this chapter, I show how the presentation of Standard English as the ideal, on the assumption that it is “the language we have in common” (DES, 1988, p. 14), alienates not just multilingual learners of English but also many school children who would regard themselves as first-language English speakers.

Media, especially those that are free, represent an important site for Englishes to display tension between local and global identities. There is a preference for international media standards, and these are closely associated in name with media (“broadcast standard English,” “BBC English,” etc.). At the same time, media providers attempt to localize English usage for various effects, including identity formation. Media Englishes, therefore, adopt and codify much of the “authority” of standard English and, at the same time, use nonstandard Englishes to construct “authenticity” within media performances. The chapter surveys the large number of media studies conducted from the World Englishes perspectives and identifies common themes running through them – most notably, the expression of popular culture identities in various media Englishes and the use of English as a linguistic resource within other media languages. It considers sociolinguists’ traditional rejection of the media as a motivating factor in language change and considers more recent evidence that the media provide positive norms for the acquisition of English across the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles of users.