Language attitudes and ideologies
on linguistic diversity

Language ideology

A descriptive orientation

seeks to research, identify and understand the shared beliefs of some collective

how language arrangements ought to be and why the collective feels this way

A critical orientation

criticizing the sociolinguistic world for its inequalities, its injustices, and its systems of domination

fundamentally qualitative

Language attitudes

psychological tendency to favor or disfavor a particular entity

sexiness of French is favourable, whereas the attractiveness of Russian is dubious

An evaluation of whether, in what way, and to what extent, a specific language, is favourable.

the use of more than one language in a place where the monolingual assumption reigns are undesirable

both quantitative and qualitative

Language ideology and attitudes
in applied linguistics

Governments pursue language policies that favour certain languages

Preserving ancient Norse language of the Icelandic Sagas

Beliefs regulate home language maintenance

Spanish/Quechua multilingualism of Peru

They regulate linguistic diversity at the macro and micro level

A nexus between language ideology and language attitudes

The genesis of a specific attitude can indeed sometimes be traced to a systematic language ideology.

An individual’s attitude may be the obvious articulation of an ideology to which the individual subscribes

ideologies and attitudes may be incongruent