Attitüde has served äs a variable in many sociolinguistic studies (for a methodological and topical review, see Agheyisi and Fishman, 1970; for a recent compendium, see Shuy and Fasold, 1973). This has been true in part because attitude is a central concept in the social sciences generally and in part because sociolinguistic phenomena are complex enough to motivate a search for equally complex predictive hypothetical constructs. Thus, for example, language attitude appears äs a catalyst for a sound change (Labov, 1963), a defining characteristic of a speech Community (Labov, 1966), a predictor of second-language achievement (Anisfeld and Lambert, 1961; Lambert, Gardner, Barik, and Tunstall, 1963;Lambert, Gardner, Olton, and Tunstall, 1968), a reflection of interethnic attitudes (Herman, 1961;Lambert, Anisfeld, and Yeni-Komshian, 1965), a determinant of interlingual intelligibility (Wolff, 1959), and a determinant of teachers' perceptions of their pupils' ability (Seligman, Lambert, and Tucker, 1972).While it is not remarkable that language attitude appears äs a variable in sociolinguistic studies, it is surprising that the work of attitude theorists on the one band and the work of sociolinguists on the other should have been conducted in relative Isolation from one another. Sociolinguistic investigators' use of attitude äs a variable has proceeded largely without reference to issues in the theory and measurement of attitudes, and the procedures and data developed by sociolinguists have been largely ignored by attitude theorists. This mutual Isolation is unfortunate because each research tradition can benefit from the other. Sociolinguistic behavior can serve äs a rieh source of data against which attitude theories can be tested. Moreover, some of the attitude measure-1 This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper prepared for the Interna-
