Volume 2025, Issue 295

This paper analyses the metalinguistic statements about Italo-Romance dialetti made in Italian song lyrics. The analysis shows that attitudes and ideologies expressed in pop culture often mirror widespread language beliefs in Italian society: singers are divided between those who hold a positive opinion of dialects and those with a more negative perspective. The latter tend to reflect deep-rooted stereotypes, such as the perception of dialects as inferior languages spoken by historically marginalised groups. These representations underline the media’s role in circulating cultural stereotypes and reinforcing social bias. At the same time, other artists challenge these stereotypes, advocating dialects as symbols of identity and condemning their social stigmatisation. Nonetheless, both positive and negative attitudes often rely on a rather simplified conceptions of dialect. The findings suggest that, despite the increasing use of dialects in Italian music, long-standing prejudices and stereotypes persist. The paper highlights how analysing attitudes conveyed by the media can provide a broader understanding of the language attitudes existing in society.

Résumé La présence de la langue arabe suscite de nombreuses réactions aussi bien en France qu’en Espagne. Dans ce travail, nous présentons les résultats d’une enquête qualitative menée auprès de 21 personnes non arabophones résidant dans les villes de Grenoble (en France) et de Saragosse (en Espagne). À travers l’analyse d’entretiens semi-directifs, nous identifions les attitudes linguistiques des participants envers la langue arabe et nous les mettons en relation avec les idéologies qui les sous-tendent. Nous révélons ainsi des attitudes appréciatives et dépréciatives envers la langue, sa sonorité et son prestige et nous décortiquons les associations que les personnes interviewées établissent entre la langue et d’autres éléments non linguistiques tels que la culture ou la religion.

As in many parts of Europe, Austria has seen increasing internationalization of its public universities since modernization reforms towards autonomy and accompanying steering-at-a-distance practices of state ministries. Here, we explore the sociolinguistic relevance of such neoliberal governance on this trend. In a novel turn, we invert the common lens on English as an incoming language to examine instead the monitoring of internationalization data from the pluricentric context of the German-speaking DACH region, comprising Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. We expound on this as an imagined speech community, vis-à-vis which Austria can be seen through steering at multiscalar level to rearticulate its very identity as a nation state. As part of an innovative use of process tracing methodology, we consulted policy documentation and monitoring data on DACH internationalization in order to probe key stakeholders at a public case study university and at ministerial level on its relevance. An analysis of stance revealed that steering conversations mutually reinforced a move away from the inbound mobility of students and staff from DACH – a dynamic that was disfavoured as inhibitory of progress, a less real form of internationalization, and unambitious, thereby at odds with neoliberal governance towards performance and competitiveness.

There are many skilled immigrants from mainland China in Canada. Despite being well-educated professionals, they often do not speak fluent English. To understand this sociolinguistic phenomenon, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 informants. The results indicate that faced with linguistic and cultural barriers in multicultural Canada, the informants are disadvantaged in the job market and experience social distance from their white local counterparts. They believe that overcoming these barriers requires a substantial investment in English, with no guaranteed return. Therefore, they prefer to invest in areas that provide job security, such as developing their professional skills. These findings are then analysed through Bourdieu’s class perspective: the informants’ positions within the social space of Canadian society and their social trajectory suggest that investing in symbolic capital in the form of the dominant linguistic and cultural competencies is not the most effective path to upward mobility. Instead, they find it more prudent to focus on enhancing their professional skills to strengthen their current positions.

This paper examines the perceived authenticity of the varieties of Breton spoken by both traditional native speakers and “new speakers,” who acquire the language through courses and immersion schools. Specifically, it takes the case of lexical items; while French borrowings used in Breton are considered “impurities” by some Breton speakers, the neologisms coined to replace them using Celtic morphemes have been criticized for their inauthenticity. This contrast between French borrowings (associated with the “authentic” speech of native speakers) and Celtic neologisms (purportedly “inauthentic” and used primarily by new speakers) has been the subject of numerous academic studies. However, in contrast to previous work, this paper uses empirical data to investigate participants’ ideologies surrounding both types of lexical items. It uses survey data from an online Breton community to examine speakers’ preferences for neologisms and borrowings, the perceived authenticity of both types of terms, and speakers’ own definitions of “authentic” Breton. Results are paradoxical: while participants believe that older native speakers have the most authentic Breton, they also describe more recently coined neologisms as the most authentic type of lexical item. New speakers also overwhelmingly produce neologisms over French borrowings in the survey tasks, a fact which gives us a better sense of the future shape of the Breton lexicon.

The aim of our study is to investigate possible relevant relationships between declared attitudes toward Spanish borrowing and actual language use among speakers of Nahuatl in the Huasteca Potosina in Mexico. The main source of our quantitative data was a survey collected from 121 speakers, which included questions on attitudes toward borrowing, self-assessed language proficiency, and demographic background, as well as a section inviting respondents to choose between more puristic and more Hispanicised sentence options. Twenty participants of the survey also took part in a visual stimuli-based language proficiency assessment experiment in which we tested for the presence of Spanish loanwords. The results of the quantitative study were confronted with qualitative data involving interviews and participant observation. The analysis of the quantitative data revealed strong negative attitudes toward Spanish borrowing in Nahuatl and a correlation between declared purism, i.e. negative attitudes to borrowing, and preference for puristic sentence options. However, declared purism had little reflection in actual language use in the proficiency assessment experiment. This study demonstrates that use of a variety of materials and careful methodology are needed in order to make advances in this topic.