Ethnolinguistic Orientation and Language Variation: Measuring and Archiving Ethnolinguistic Vitality, Attitudes, and Identity

Abstract

Abstract Sociolinguists and social psychologists have long been interested in how language variation is associated with social psychological variables, including people's beliefs about and attitudes toward languages and their speakers, as well as their feelings of affiliation with ethnolinguistic groups, and there is a growing interest in archiving such information along with sociolinguistic data for subsequent research. With this end in mind, we suggest some brief, quantitative indices that might be appropriate and useful for documenting social psychological variables for contemporary and future purposes. The first construct considered is ethnolinguistic vitality , which refers to those characteristics that make a language group likely to behave as an active collective entity in language contact situations. The second is language attitudes , which refer to the feelings and beliefs that people hold with regard to their own and others' languages and the associated language community/ies. The third is ethnolinguistic identity , which refers to the manner and extent to which individuals define themselves as members of an ethnolinguistic group. Although we maintain that more extensive, detailed coding should be included in sociolinguistic archives, we suggest that these three sets of indices should be minimally included in a battery to assess a speaker's ethnolinguistic orientation.