The chapter focuses on religious and ethnic affiliation as social factors that influence the structure of variation in several Arabic-speaking communities. We go beyond the simplistic correlations between religious/ethnic groupings and language, and seek to uncover the histories and social meanings of variation based on such groupings. We include examples, both old and new, to illustrate variation according to these factors.

The questionnaire, one of the most frequently used methods in the study of language attitudes, can be used to elicit both qualitative and quantitative data. This chapter focuses on the questionnaire as a means of eliciting quantitative data by means of closed questions. It begins by examining the strengths of doing this (e.g. the fact that the resulting data can easily be compared and analysed across participants) as well as the limitations (e.g. the fact that issues unforeseen by the researcher usually do not come to the fore). The chapter then discusses key issues in research planning and design: for example, question types, question wording, question order, reliability and validity, and more general issues regarding questionnaire design. The chapter also considers questionnaire distribution. The exploration of data analysis and interpretation focuses on data cleaning and coding, statistical analyses, and some points of caution regarding the interpretation of findings from questionnaire-based studies. A case study of language attitudes in Quebec serves to illustrate the main points made in the chapter. The chapter concludes with further important considerations regarding the context-specificity of findings and the benefits of combining questionnaires with other methods of attitude elicitation.

This chapter discusses the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and its variants as novel measures for implicit language attitudes. The IAT is a reaction time-based categorisation task that measures automatic associations between a target and attribute concept. In the case of language attitudes, this comes down to measuring whether people automatically associate a language (variety) or linguistic feature with positive/negative valence or with specific social attributes of the speaker. The method originates in social psychology, where it has been used to study a wide variety of topics (e.g. racial bias, self-esteem), and has recently been introduced to linguistics to study the social meaning of language variation. This chapter discusses the merits and potential disadvantages of using the IAT paradigm for such linguistic purposes. In addition, the chapter gives a practical introduction to setting up a study using the IAT paradigm and explains how to analyse the reaction time data harvested in the experiment and interpret the results. The main points of the chapter are illustrated with a case study that uses the P-IAT to measure associations with Standard Belgian Dutch as well as two regional varieties of Belgian Dutch.

The chapter focuses on gender-differentiated patterns. It begins with a review of Labov’s principles regarding gender differentiation and proceeds to rectify misconceptions about the interpretation of Arabic data. It contains ample examples from a variety of regions and dialects that illustrate different patterns of gender-based variation.

The chapter discusses contact-induced phenomena, the models used in linguistics to represent processes of diffusion, and the principles that govern them. It explains several cases of diffusion across language barriers, borrowing and substrate effects, dialect contact, and new-dialect formation.

Although language attitudes are typically studied among adults, research at the intersection of developmental psychology and sociolinguistics suggests that the capacity to view language as providing social meaning emerges early in development. This chapter provides a developmental overview of research on infants’ and young children’s attention to language and accent as conveying social meaning, and reveals the process by which children begin discriminating languages, forming preferences, and ultimately expressing social attitudes that reflect societal input about linguistic status and stereotypes. Studies of infants rely on non-verbal responses such as looking behaviours. As infants grow into young children, both verbal and non-verbal methods are used to assess children’s preferences, inferences, and attitudes about people who speak in different ways. This chapter introduces different experimental methods that can be used to study infants’ and young children’s language-based social responses, including a discussion of the methods’ strengths and limitations. The chapter addresses key practical issues of planning and research design (e.g. recruitment and sample size) as well as data analysis and interpretation (e.g. how to interpret the meaning of infants’ looking responses). To illustrate these points, the chapter concludes with a case study of American children’s attitudes towards Northern and Southern American English.

This chapter shows how semi-structured interviews can contribute to the study of language attitudes. It pays particular attention to how understanding interviews as contextually and socially situated speech events, shaped by the spatial and temporal context in which they take place and the relationship between interviewer(s) and interviewee(s), is crucial for the analysis and interpretation of interview data. It addresses the strengths of using interviews to investigate attitudes (e.g. that they may bring to light new information, new topics, and new dimensions to established knowledge) as well as their limitations (e.g. that participants may say what they believe the interviewer wants to hear or agree with the interviewer’s questions, regardless of their content). Following a discussion of the key practical issues of planning and research design including constructing an interview protocol, choosing the language or variety to use in the interview, and presenting multiple languages or varieties in interview transcripts, it explains how the qualitative data resulting from semi-structured interviews can be analysed thematically. The chapter ends with an illustration of interview methodology on the basis of a case study of attitudes towards Cypriot Greek in London’s Greek Cypriot diaspora.

This chapter describes how to carry out an attitudinal study using the matched-guise technique (henceforth MGT), an indirect method to elicit language attitudes. In its traditional design, participants listen to the voices of several speakers who are each reading or saying the same text in different linguistic varieties (i.e. guises), and then evaluate them on a series of traits – usually along the dimensions of status and solidarity. Participants are not aware that they are listening to the same speaker more than once, which allows researchers to attribute any differences in ratings to the linguistic varieties under investigation. This chapter discusses the advantages of using the MGT, as well as how to overcome or minimise its drawbacks. The chapter also considers key issues of planning and research design (e.g. how to choose culturally appropriate listening stimuli and personal traits) as well as appropriate statistical analyses of data obtained by means of this method. The main points of the chapter are illustrated with a case study of attitudes towards Spanish, English, and different types of code-switching in Puerto Rico.

The chapter explains the basic principles of linguistic change from a sociolinguistic variationist perspective. It begins with an explanation of the inextricable relationship between linguistic variation and change, and proceeds to demonstrate how language change can be observed, investigated, and explained. Sociolinguists can document and analyse language change using either the real-time method or the apparent-time construct; these methods and their advantages and pitfalls are explained and exemplified.

This chapter outlines how historical data can be used for research on language attitudes, concentrating on the field of historical sociolinguistics. It first discusses methodological challenges when working with historical data. Since historical (socio-)linguists cannot elicit data, they rely on the written and typically fragmented data available, which provide limited access to the attitudes of individuals. Furthermore, the boundaries between language attitudes and language ideologies are less sharply drawn in historical sociolinguistic research than in research on present-day data. Attitudes and ideologies are usually not addressed separately and often set in other linguistic contexts, such as language standardisation, linguistic purism, and prescriptivism. The second section of the chapter provides an overview of promising text sources that can be utilised to study language attitudes in the past, including normative texts, ego-documents, and statistical accounts, discussing both their potentials and drawbacks. The third section explains how these sources can be analysed, focussing on discourse-analytical and corpus-linguistic methods. To illustrate the main points made in this chapter, two case studies (one on German and one on Dutch) are presented. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of emerging trends in historical sociolinguistics, particularly the move towards studying language attitudes in multilingual settings.

This chapter provides an overview of how priming can be used to enhance the study of language attitudes. Priming refers to the non-conscious, automatic effect a stimulus can have on subsequent behaviour, arising from experience- or ideologically based associations between items or concepts. In language-based tasks, priming can surface as faster recall or recognition, and can also result in a response bias toward items associated with the prime. This chapter discusses work that examines how priming can be used to examine language attitudes and how priming can impact language attitude ratings. We provide recommendations for best practices and make suggestions for future research.