Attitudes, Ideology and Awareness

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Text genres that introduce or overview sociolinguistics as a discipline (historical accounts, introductory books, handbooks), normally group attitudes and ideology with the applications (language planning, politics, education, etc.), or with the type of topics (language contact, choice, multilingualism, etc.) that characterizes the sociology of language tradition Against this backdrop, the present handbook’s inclusion of a language attitudes chapter in its “Language Variation and Change” section is noteworthy. Theories that aim to explain language change processes operate with a number of “factors” that make up these processes. There is little disagreement about what to put in the total pool of factors, but views differ as to how the different factors interrelate and function. The fundamental question is which factor(s) we should conceive of as the driving force, and which ones we should consider as conditions. The factors may be differently grouped in theoretical frameworks, but in general such different groupings do not reflect the theory’s answer to the driving-force versus conditions question. If a theory operates with the common distinction between internal and external factors, internal factors will typically refer to possibilities and constraints in terms of fundamental speaker/hearer-based processing capacities (articulation and perception) in interplay with a concrete language system, while external factors will cover possibilities and constraints in terms of the material and ideological aspects of social structure. The distinction itself does not imply any commitment as to where the driving force is to be found. The same can be said of William Labov’s division of his monumental work on Principles of Linguistic Change into three volumes, subtitled Internal Factors (1994), Social Factors (2001), and Cognitive Factors (forthc.). However, if I in this chapter operate with a distinction between subjective factors (social values and evaluations) and objective factors (all the others), it is not only because it gives me a cover term for “attitudes, ideology and awareness”, but mainly because it reflects the theoretical position I want to advocate, namely that language change is driven by what I prefer to call “subconscious attitudes”. This position is derived from our research in Denmark, which I shall return to at the end (section 3). But the main bulk of the chapter is a presentation and discussion of Labov’s work – simply because this is where we find the main effort within variationism to theorize the role of subjective factors on the basis of independent empirical data (i.e. other data than the language use data).