Language is a social identifier that conveys information about speakers and thus allows us to evaluate our interlocutors on a range of social and cultural parameters. All languages have dialectal variation and one specific variety that is usually considered standard. For many languages, it has been demonstrated that speakers with a standard accent are evaluated better than those with a non-standard accent with respect to a variety of personality traits. However, there are very few studies measuring ...
Language is a social identifier that conveys information about speakers and thus allows us to evaluate our interlocutors on a range of social and cultural parameters. All languages have dialectal variation and one specific variety that is usually considered standard. For many languages, it has been demonstrated that speakers with a standard accent are evaluated better than those with a non-standard accent with respect to a variety of personality traits. However, there are very few studies measuring attitudes toward Catalan dialects and, as far as we know, there are no studies contrasting relative perceptions of the specific varieties of Catalan spoken in Barcelona and Tortosa. The present study wants to investigate the degree in which the variety of Catalan spoken in Barcelona might have more social prestige than that spoken in Tortosa. The matched-guise technique (Lambert et al., 1960) has been used to compare attitudes among teenagers, young people and elder people from both Barcelona and Tortosa. The results demonstrate that rates given to Barcelonian speakers were significantly more positive on the status dimension, but rates on the solidarity dimension, contrary to the initial research hypothesis, were significantly more positive towards Tortosian speakers in all cases. It has also been found that people in Barcelona and Tortosa tend to think that Barcelonian Catalan is the most correct variety. However, the opinions and rates are different when the participants are college students enrolled in language and linguistics related degrees. These findings provide useful insights on the prevalent biases among Catalan speakers towards their own language and its different varieties and show that there is a lack of linguistic awareness among most of the population.
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