Essay On Language Attitude

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Attitude is a mental and emotional response to the variety of circumstances that occur in our life. In language contact situations, people show different attitudes towards languages. Attitude in general is a hypothetical psychological construct which defines or promotes certain behaviours and explains their direction and persistence. Hogg & Vaughan (2005:150) defines attitude is "a organization of beliefs, feelings, and behavioral tendencies towards objects, groups, events or symbols"(cited in Saul Mcleod, 2009). Attitude is a positive or negative react to a person or circumstances. Matsuda (2000:28-30) took the definition of Baker (1992) and interpreted the construct with three components: cognitive, affective, and conative (readiness for action). With view to language …show more content…

It comes from the Latin Word ‘aptitude’ and the Italian ‘atto’. Allport (1935) says, “attitude is a mental or neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related” (cited in Baker, 1992:11). Attitudes, according to Crystal (1997: 215), are the feelings people have about their own language or the languages of others. Thus, attitude to language is a construct that explains linguistic behaviour in particular. There may be both positive and negative feelings attached to a language. Baker (1992: 11) quotes Ajzen (1988) who says, attitude is ‘a disposition to respond favourably or unfavourably to an object, person, institution, or event’. It means that if a speech community shows their unfavourablity to a particular language, that language is unlikely to survive and vice-versa. Ben (1968) says, ‘attitudes are self-descriptions or self-perceptions’. That means that attitude can be identified through observations of the individuals own behaviour. For example people observe themselves speaking

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