230263 Investigating Dialect Attitudes (S) (WiSe 2024/2025)

This class is part of this semester’s over-arching topic of Democracy.

The term language attitudes describes the phenomenon that people (readers or listeners) often categorise others solely by a feature of their language production. For example, speakers who display features of rural dialects are often perceived to be less educated and intelligent, but also more friendly and approachable than speakers of more standard-like dialects. These categorisations are not accurate, and they often happen involuntarily.

In this class, we will investigate these attitudes with regards to different dialects of English. What dialects are evaluated in what way? How can we investigate these attitudes? Are there interactions with things like gender or where the listeners come from?

Teilnahmevoraussetzungen, notwendige Vorkenntnisse

I strongly recommend that you have completed Basis3.1 (Introduction to English Linguistics) and Basis3.2 (Introduction to Sociolinguistics), as these lay the foundation for the content we will be discussing.

Literaturangaben

Readings will be made available in the moodle.