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As its title suggests, this book focuses on attitudes to language and dialect production, perception, and use, and particularly on attitudes to language variation, dialect, speech style, language preference, and minority languages as well as their speakers. As we know, an important aspect of the complex social psychology of speech communities is the arbitrary and subjective intellectual and emotional response of a society's members to the languages and varieties in their social environment: Different language varieties are often associated with deep-rooted emotional responses - social attitudes, in short - such as thoughts, feelings, stereotypes, and prejudices about people, about social, ethnic and religious groups, and about political entities. These emotional responses and perceptions of language and dialect phenomena are biased by cultural, social, political, economic, or historical facts or other circumstances within the speech community. Sociolinguistically based research may build a more complete and accurate picture of the speaker's linguistic behavior, in the context of its complex social psychology, as well as of the regard for language use within the community, and may further understanding of the dynamics of speech communities as well as of the subjective life of language varieties.
This approach to the area of language attitudes and message effects is not new; other works, such as Shaw & Wright 1967, Triandis 1971, Trudgill 1975, Henderson et al. 1987, Ajzen 1988, Preston 1989, Baker 1992, and Oppenheim 1992, or edited volumes such as Ryan & Giles 1982, Preston 1999, or Long & Preston 2002 have also emphasized its relevance, dealing with aspects such as language boundary perceptions, the aesthetics and prestige of dialects, attitudes toward language, dialect and accent varieties, gender differences, mental maps, dialect imitation, dialect distance, nativeness, difference perceptions, and so on. Yet new initiatives such as the work of Garrett, Coupland & Williams are always laudable, not only from the point of view of contrastive sociolinguistics, but also because of its originality: It provides us with a critical and comparative appraisal of the research methods traditionally applied in the study of attitudes, based on the authors' own research experience in Wales.
The authors claim an eclectic multi-method approach and propose three aims of the book: (i) "to provide an overview of approaches to investigating language attitudes"; (ii) "to introduce a...