ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the foundational properties of Folk Linguistics (FL) and their relevance to other areas of linguistic science and focuses on their importance to language awareness. A great deal of FL evidence from work done in the United States points to an ideological belief in a cognitively exterior existence of language itself, that is, a locating of language outside the mental construct normally represented by linguists. FL supplements, contrasts, and offers explanatory backgrounds to both qualitative and experimental work in the social psychology of language or 'language attitudes'. Students of language attitudes have seemed to be on a quest for the 'true' or 'real' attitude, perhaps most expressed in the development of experimental designs fashioned to retrieve implicit attitudes. Even sociolinguists have suggested that there may be less variety in the social perception of language than in its performance.
