Acceso usuarios
Marco Santello
The goal of this study is to identify new dimensions of language attitudes to allow for both their multidimensionality and possible language-specificity stemming from local sociolinguistic environments. Adopting a two-step methodology comprising (1) elicitation of adjectives in group interviews and (2) employment of the semantic differential technique within a direct approach, this article demonstrates that language attitudes of bilinguals may be made up of a number of latent dimensions that go beyond those found in previous academic studies. In particular, Italian English bilinguals in Australia rate their languages according to three idiosyncratic dimensions only partly ascertained in the literature: attractiveness, superiority and efficiency. These three dimensions, emerged through rotated principal component analysis, reveal the significance of bilingualism in attitude formation. Moreover, this study provides insights on language attitudes as constructions avulsed from their contextualised manifestations and indeed accounts for both their language-specific singularity and intrinsic multidimensionality.
