Modeling Language Attitudes: Attitudinal Measurements and Linguistic Behavior in Two Bilingual Communities

This paper investigates whether attitudinal measures can predict usage in two bilingual communities with radically different language policies. We compare 163 participants’ (ages 24–36) rates of spontaneous language usage to two attitudinal measures among Welsh—English and Lombard—Italian bilinguals. Usage rates are found to correlate with Matched Guise Technique status scores for Lombard and to predict solidarity scores for Welsh. A different picture emerges from the Implicit Association Test, with scores correlating with usage for Welsh but not for Lombard. We link these findings to the radically different levels of sociopolitical support associated with the regional/minority languages and the nature of the two attitudinal measures. Our findings suggest that the utility of different attitudinal measures depends partly on sociopolitical circumstances and on the type of association intrinsically addressed in each measure. These have important implications for both the study of language attitudes and research on language vitality.