Abstract
AbstractAlthough English is becoming increasingly entrenched in Western Europe, large‐scale comparative studies of attitudes among the general public to this development are scarce. We investigate over 4,000 Dutch and Germans’ attitudes towards English based on responses to an attitudinal questionnaire. Respondents saw English as a useful additional language, but not generally as a threat to their national language. Using k‐means, an unsupervised clustering algorithm, we identified two attitudinal groups per country. Respondents with positive attitudes towards English, regardless of nationality, tended to be younger, urban, better educated and more proficient in English than their compatriots with more negative views of English. These within‐country differences outweighed between‐country ones, for example, that Germans were more confident in the status of their L1, whereas Dutch showed signs of ‘English fatigue’. The findings thus appear to confirm the previously identified divide between elite ‘haves’ versus ‘have‐nots’ of English.
Highlights
English is becoming increasingly entrenched in continental Europe, especially in Western and Northern European countries
The positive groups were associated with higher education in English and in a combination of English and their national language, the negative groups with higher education in the national language (χ2 = 572.17, df = 12, p < 0.001, all pairwise differences p < 0.001)
Our investigation of over 4,000 Dutch and Germans’ attitudes towards English has confirmed earlier suggestions of a ‘spokesman problem’ (De Bot & Weltens 1997, p. 145), namely that vociferous warnings about the threat and infiltration of English often heard in the media are not necessarily shared by large swathes of the general public
Summary
English is becoming increasingly entrenched in continental Europe, especially in Western and Northern European countries. Erling found that such ‘macro-attitudes’ expressed by the media, politicians and protectionist groups are not necessarily reflected in the ‘micro-attitudes’ of people on the ground: even German university students of English, as in her study, placed great value on and recognised the importance of German as the national language. Prominent voices in the Dutch media and public discourse regularly lament issues from the encroachment of English in education to the purported slavishness of the Dutch towards Anglo-American culture Protectionist organisations such as the Stichting Nederlands propose alternatives for Anglicisms, while the rather vitriolic Stichting Taalverdediging Nederlands labels public figures who appear all too pro-English as ‘language traitors’ and compares the promotion of English to the Nazi occupation during World War II They found that the students’ evaluations of the use of English ‘were not always as negative (‘odd’/‘exaggerated’) nor as positive (‘prestige-enhancing’) as those found in scholarly and more popular publications’, questioning to what extent ‘academics, advertising agencies, and opinion leaders [...] can speak for “ordinary” language users’ (Van Meurs et al, 2007, p. 202)
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