Abstract
A strand of recent sociolinguistic research has focused on how attitudes towards language varieties are intrinsically linked with processes of language shift and language change: some have examined the perception of specific features (Buchstaller 2006; Campbell-Kibler 2007, 2008, 2009; Labov, Ash, Ravindranath, Weldon, Baranowski and Nagy 2011), while others have concentrated on attitudes towards whole dialects or languages (Coupland and Bishop 2007; Garrett 2010; Lippi-Green 2011). Much of this research comes precisely when a new feature is gaining ground or when a dialect or language is in the process of shift, and indeed, attitudes can be good predictors of linguistic shift related to age, gender, social class and other external factors. How can we be completely sure, however, that the attitudes are genuinely precursors to actual shift if we do not have concrete knowledge about attitudes in the period before the change? Attitude shifts may merely happen to run parallel to the linguistic changes and not be related to them. To gauge whether attitudes influence linguistic shift, real-time change in attitudes needs to be examined where possible, alongside research on attitudes at a single point in time. While sociolinguistic research has conclusively demonstrated that the apparent-time construct is appropriate to examine language change in many contexts (Bailey 2002), it has not been clarified whether this can be directly transferred to change in linguistic attitudes.
* I would like to acknowledge the support of the British Academy for a Small Research Grant and the help provided by Shetland ForWirds (particularly Bruce Eunson and Laureen Johnson) and the Shetland Islands Council School Board when collecting the data. I would also like to thank Gunnel Melchers who very generously sent over the 1983 data for further analysis. Thanks also go to Jennifer Smith, Robert Lawson, the anonymous reviewers and audiences at UKLVC 8, Sociolinguistics Symposium 19 and the Regional Varieties, Language Shift and Language Identities Conference for helpful comments and suggestions, and to Beth Cole for the preliminary analysis of the data. Finally, thanks to the many children in Shetland who completed the questionnaires.
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Durham, M. (2014). Thirty Years Later: Real-Time Change and Stability in Attitudes towards the Dialect in Shetland. In: Lawson, R. (eds) Sociolinguistics in Scotland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137034717_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137034717_15
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