ABSTRACT
People’s beliefs and feelings are related to their linguistic behavior, and feelings about language forms impact people who use those forms. Beliefs and feelings are also interesting in themselves and have practical implications, for example in language policy and planning. When we study beliefs and feelings about language, we are studying language attitudes and language ideologies. We use a variety of methods to learn about them, including interviews, ethnographic observation, online data mining, surveys, and experiments. The chapter focuses on a particular technique for learning about language attitudes. In speaker evaluation studies, recordings are played to listeners, who then share opinions about the voices they heard. The recordings differ in specific ways, for example one in Spanish and one in English, or in two different regional accents. Listener reactions can be taken to indicate something about how the listeners view the language forms in question.
