New approaches to measuring the social meaning of language variation

This talk reports on a research project that studies the perception of language variation in Belgian Dutch. The purpose of the project is twofold. First and foremost, this research has a methodological focus. Since the introduction of the matched guise technique (Lambert et al. 1960), quantitative language attitude research has hardly seen any methodological innovation. This contrasts sharply with the explosion of new attitude measures in social psychology, a field of research that is engaged in the study of attitudes – just like sociolinguistics. That is why this research project investigates which social psychological methods are suited and which adaptations they require to function as a tool for research into the social meaning of language variation. In addition to this methodological focus, the project has a descriptive component. It aims to give an impetus to the exploration of the language attitudes landscape in Flanders which has received relatively little scientific attention (Geeraerts & Van de Velde 2013). In the research project, I aim to achieve these methodological and descriptive goals in three case studies. In a first set of experiments, the Personalized Implicit Association Test (P-IAT, Olson & Fazio 2004) is applied to measure attitudes towards a two regional varieties of Dutch in Belgium, as well as Standard Belgian Dutch. The second case study delves deeper into the possibilities and limitations of the aforementioned method by entering a context dimension into the P-IAT’s design. Finally, in a third series of experiments, the Relational Responding Task (RRT, De Houwer et al. 2015) is explored and, for the first time, used to measure the social meaning of language variation.status: publishe