The Walt Disney corporation and its affiliates wield a huge amount of power in our modern media landscape, especially in regards to children’s media. In turn, a selection of evidence presented in this chapter argues that the linguistic patterning in media has an effect on children, in particular on their ideas about the social world and gender. Thus, Disney is an important area of study for understanding the effect of media on children, specifically in terms of language and gender. This chapter restates the importance of conducting sociolinguistic research on scripted media, and defends this methodological practice. Further, it also explains the methodology of the book, which includes both quantitative and qualitative research in order to assess the role of media representations in the construction of gender and gendered discourses. Finally, this chapter outlines the book in full, which includes a historical context of Disney and Pixar, a quantitative examination of speech amounts broken down by gender, an examination of specific speech acts (compliments, directives, insults, and apologies), and an qualitative examination of queerness in Disney films.

This chapter begins the sociolinguistic journey of the book, focusing on quantitative analysis of compliments alongside more detail-oriented qualitative analysis. Compliments, as a speech act, work to attribute ‘goods’ to others and thus naturally carries larger value judgments about what a society views as ‘good.’ Compliments in childrens’ movies likewise act as a lens to reveal what the filmmakers consider worthy of praise in their characters — and importantly, whether that varies by gender. In Disney and Pixar films, compliment giving is not presented as particularly gendered but receiving compliments skews towards female recipients. Qualitatively, female characters on-screen together are portrayed as using compliments as a routine politeness strategy and female villains use the guise of this practice to hide more nefarious purposes. This chapter also finds some tentative initial evidence linking femininity and politeness. While compliments are used by both male and female characters, the female characters use compliments as a routine politeness or rapport-building strategy, whereas male characters complimenting another outside task-based settings is less routine, and at times even framed as a climatically “big deal.” This suggests that although characters of either gender can compliment, compliments as a routine politeness strategy is still associated more closely with femininity.

This chapter focuses on apologies, another active, face-saving politeness strategy. Apologies are a way of conducting politeness and preserving interpersonal relationships. There is a clear perception that women apologize more, or apologize unnecessarily, and this chapter examines if that is reflected in Disney and Pixar films. Quantitatively, both male and female characters apologize in these films, and in a certain proportion of the cases the authors suspect this is determined more by the specifics of the plot than by gender or any other characteristic of the speaker. At the same time, the authors find some patterning at the extremes that seems more clearly linked to gender. While apologizing may not be marked as specifically associated with femininity, non-apology strategies do seem to be mostly used by the male characters. One explanation for this is that women have been held more responsible for maintaining social relations and catering to the face needs of others. Femininity may be tied to a focus on making sure the social harm is repaired, while masculinity involves more of an emphasis on producing the speech act of the apology while (if possible) hedging against the inherent face threat it involves.

This chapter provides a historical context for Disney and Pixar, and delineates how the two studios have evolved to respond in different ways when it comes to the politics of media representation. The Classic Era of Disney (1937-1959) features a conservative vision of the ideal female character, princesses who are polite, kind, white, and traditionally beautiful. The Renaissance Era of Disney(1989-1997) buoyed by the second and third waves of feminism began to present more “empowered” heroines, who aimed to embody (or at least acknowledge) the values of feminism, and some diversity in terms of look, even if the actors and speech remain primarily white. The New Age Era of Disney (2009-2019) is ongoing, and features more diverse princesses both in terms of look and in terms of subverting more traditional princess tropes (Frozen) or doing away with romance altogether (Brave and Moana). Pixar does not have eras in the same way as the Disney films, because it is less less focused on female leads and thus less influenced by feminist discourse . However, Pixar is important in terms of examining masculinity in children’s films, and how language and gender compares to the Disney canon.

This chapter examines what research falls under the epithet of ‘mixed-methods’ and discusses the main advantages of conducting mixed-methods research. The chapter introduces the key issues of mixed-methods research planning and design: that is, the tackling of ontological and epistemological challenges, the equal weighting of methods, and the sequencing of methods. The chapter also provides information regarding the analysis of data resulting from mixed-methods research, and how this can be done in a manner that provides appropriate integration. The key issues of the chapter are illustrated by means of two case studies. The first investigates attitudes towards French and English in Montreal, making use of a questionnaire and a matched-guise experiment. This case study shows how mixed-methods approaches can lead to a deeper understanding of language attitudes as part of larger social processes in a manner that no one method on its own could do. The second case study examines attitudes towards Catalan in Northern Catalonia by means of interviews and variable analysis. This case study demonstrates how mixed-methods research allows for a broader representation of the attitudinal and ideological landscape of a specific language community than could be afforded by the use of one method alone.

The quantitative study of linguistic variables has been an integral part of sociolinguistic research since the mid twentieth century, but it was only recently that the use of attitudinal data as potential quantitative correlates of language variation has been advanced, thereby uniting the agentive focus of recent variationist scholarship with quantifiable attitudinal findings. Based on the fact that conation is one of the components of attitudes, this chapter demonstrates how variable analysis can profoundly enrich our knowledge of language attitudes. The key strengths of using variable analysis (e.g. high levels of statistical rigour) are discussed at length, as well as the potential limitations and complications (e.g. how to align ‘big’ attitudinal data with social constructivist frameworks). The chapter discusses practical issues of research design, such as the tasks by means of which phonetic, morphosyntactic, and lexical variables can be elicited. Analytical approaches that are suitable to the analysis of both variationist and attitudinal data are addressed, with an emphasis on mixed-effects linear regression modelling. To illustrate the key points pertaining to variable analysis as a means of investigating language attitudes, the chapter concludes with a case study of Catalan as spoken in southern France, in the region of Northern Catalonia.

This chapter deals with the study of how deaf and hearing signers, and others, understand sign languages by themselves and in relationship to other languages and modalities. By doing linguistic ethnography, it is possible to investigate these language attitudes and ideologies as they unfold in everyday practice, towards ideas such as the status of sign languages and particular varieties; discourses surrounding linguistic authority, authenticity and ownership; and the emergence (or development) of new sign languages and new subject-specific vocabulary. The methods discussed in this chapter are ethnographic research methods and visual methods: participant observation, ethnographic filmmaking, and language portraits. The main points of the chapter are illustrated by means of three case studies: (1) participant observation in multilingual tourist spaces in Bali, in which Indonesian Sign Language, International Sign, and American Sign Language are used; (2) ethnographic filmmaking within an international multi-sited research project focusing on International Sign; and (3) the use of language portraits with new signers and heritage signers in Flanders, who mostly use Flemish Sign Language and Dutch.

This chapter outlines how social media data, such as Facebook and Twitter, can be used to study language attitudes. This comparatively recent method in language attitudes research benefits from the immediate accessibility of large amounts of data from a wide range of people that can be collected quickly and with minimal effort – a point in common with attitude studies using print data. At the same time, this method collects people’s spontaneous thoughts, that is unprompted attitudinal data – a characteristic usually attributed to methods drawing on speech data. The study of language attitudes in social media data can, however, yield wholly different insights from writing and speech data. The chapter discusses the advantages and pitfalls of different types of content analysis as well as the general limitations of the method. The chapter presents an overview of software programmes to collect social media data, as well as geo-tagging, and addresses data analysis as well as the general usefulness of the method (e.g. its applicability around the world or the potential for diachronic attitudinal change). The case study in this chapter uses examples from Twitter, focusing on attitudes towards the Welsh accent in English.

The theatre-audience method is an indirect approach to ‘measuring’ implicit language attitudes by means of a social-psychological experiment, designed in an attempt to escape the ‘artificial’ laboratory-like contexts of the typical matched- and verbal-guise studies. The method works as follows: Over a number of evenings, an invitation to answer a questionnaire is given in different languages or varieties over the loudspeaker system in a theatre, and the varying level of cooperation is measured as the ratio of answered questionnaires to sold tickets – and interpreted in terms of variation in attitudes towards the languages or varieties used in the loudspeaker announcements. This chapter discusses the strengths of this method (e.g. data collection in a ‘natural’ context) and its limitations (e.g. the fact that people in the audience are not the same from evening to evening), and it explains the key practical issues of planning and research design (e.g. considerations regarding the choice of weekdays in order to secure comparability across evenings). Moreover, the chapter explains how to conduct statistical analyses of the data. A case study of attitudes towards varieties of Danish illustrates the main points made in the chapter.