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A matter of strength: language policy, attitudes, and linguistic dominance in three bilingual communities

Brasca, Lissander; Gruffydd, Ianto; TAMBURELLI, Marco; Breit, Florian; (2024) A matter of strength: language policy, attitudes, and linguistic dominance in three bilingual communities. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development pp. 1-21. 10.1080/01434632.2024.2408448. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between language attitudes and different bilingual language policies in three European communities where a regional/minority language is spoken: (1) the Lombard – Italian community in Italy, where Lombard does not benefit from any active policy; (2) the Moselle-Franconian – German community of the Belgian Eifel, where Moselle-Franconian speakers are a recognised linguistic minority, albeit as German-speaking, with Moselle-Franconian indirectly supported as a closely related German variety; and (3) the Welsh – English community in Wales, where the Welsh language enjoys full sociopolitical recognition. In two studies that combine a direct and an indirect method, we collected attitudinal data from a total of N = 235 participants (aged 23–38 years) across three locations. Results suggest a link between language policy and speakers’ attitudes, with Welsh scoring higher than both Moselle-Franconian and Lombard, and Moselle-Franconian scoring higher than Lombard. This trend is explained in view of a tripartite model that places horizontal bilingualism as the most positive societal situation for language maintenance, followed by diglossia, and with vertical bilingualism as the least desirable case.

Type: Article
Title: A matter of strength: language policy, attitudes, and linguistic dominance in three bilingual communities
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2024.2408448
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2024.2408448
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s), 2024. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords: bilingualism, diglossia, language attitudes, language maintenance, regional and minority languages
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10200641
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