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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 565

Part of Session 100: Montreal, a francophone, anglophone and multilingual city (Other abstracts in this session)

Evaluational Reactions to French and English in Montreal - does mother tongue really matter?

Authors: Laur, Elke
Submitted by: Laur, Elke (None, Canada)

Montreal became famous in socio-psychological and sociolinguistic circles almost half a century ago, when a group of researchers—Lambert, Hodgson, Franckel and Fillenbaum (1960)—invented a new methodology to access speech evaluations and linguistic attitudes indirectly. They came up with the idea of taping bilinguals in both their languages, French and English in this case, in order to measure Anglophone and Francophone Montrealers’ evaluations of those voices. This was the first time a method had allowed researchers to access speech associations within a minimal-stimulus-design that allowed evaluational differences to be analysed solely on the basis of language. This innovative technique, called matched guises, allows researchers to access subjects’ reactions without asking for their opinions directly or doing extensive field work. This initial research was based on certain assumptions, such as the premise that evaluational differences can be explained solely by the evaluators’ belonging to one linguistic community or another.

In 2004, we conducted another matched guise study of the evaluational reactions of Montrealers that added new aspects to the original methodological design. One of our innovations was to include members of different language groups in a representative sample of the population of Montreal so that multivariate analysis could determine the extent to which belonging to a specific linguistic group could actually account for reactions to spoken language. This article presents the analyses and comparison of the interpretation of results that enabled us to formulate new hypotheses with respect to attitudes to language in situations of linguistic contact.