Language Attitudes in a Lingua Franca: The Case of Black South African College Students

Abstract

In a context of transformation where South African students have started to confront issues of alienation and access to higher education institutions, the role of language is not a minor issue. This study explores the implicit language attitudes of a sample of 80 young L1 South African indigenous language speakers toward Standard South African English and black accented English in a university context. In using a mixed-methodological approach that investigates the interrelation between participants’ Implicit Association Test (IAT) results toward the two selected accents and their linguistic background, language exposure, and social distance levels, this study found mixed results with important sociolinguistic implications. More specifically, the notion of intersectionality (race and gender), the relevant role of the language of instruction in the development of language attitudes, and further correlations between the above-mentioned sociolinguistic variables provided valuable insight with significant social implications as well as methodological considerations.

Language change is wicked: semantic and social meaning of a polysemous adjective

“…Robinson 2010a; Braber 2022; Sandow 2022, 2023a, 2023b). While studies have used experimental methods to explore the social meaning of phonetic, phonological and morphosyntactic features, such as the matched-guise technique (Campbell-Kibler 2007; Johnstone & Kiesling 2008; Gilabert & Fuss 2018), Implicit Association Test (Campbell-Kibler 2012; McKenzie & Carrie 2018; Álvarez-Mosquera & Marín-Gutiérrez 2021) and the Social Category Association test (Llamas et al 2016), limited research has employed such methods at the level of lexical variation.…”