ABSTRACT
Chapter 15 discusses the sociolinguistic significance of people’s attitudes to language and explores two examples of areas where applications of sociolinguistics make a contribution in the “real world”, namely, education and the law. The discussion of language attitudes covers concepts such as the overt and covert prestige of different varieties and some ingenious methods of eliciting attitude data, including the matched guise technique. The educational costs of negative attitudes to some varieties (such as Ebonics) are discussed and the positive contribution of sociolinguistics to forensic linguistics is described. A range of further methods of collecting data on attitudes to language is summarised at the end of the chapter.
