ABSTRACT
In his seminal work on linguistic variation, Labov argued a significant role in sociolinguistics for the study of language attitudes. Sociolinguistic variables, he maintained, gained social meaning from their distributional patterns. His ‘subjective reaction test’ was one technique for gathering such data – for example, finding that New Yorkers associated rhoticity with high-ranking occupations (Labov 1972b). This concept of prestige has been an enduring aspect of language attitudes findings. Since then, much pioneering language attitudes work has been conducted at an interface between social psychology, where attitudes hold a place of central prominence for understanding social behaviour and thought, and sociolinguistics, with its focus on social aspects of language specifically. This chapter first reviews some of this work and then considers some of the main current issues and developments.
