General Linguistics

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Browsing General Linguistics by Subject "Language Attitudes"

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    An Investigation into the Attitudes towards Trinidadian French Creole in the Education System
    (2021-05-28) Joseph, Carmen; White, Lee Ann
    The various research projects done on Trinidadian French Creole (TFC) have focused mainly on areas such as sociolinguistics, sociohistorical linguistics and structural features of the language, but not on how language attitudes within the education system have impacted and can impact the revival of this endangered language variety. In order to efficiently evaluate this impact of language in education, the attitudes towards French Creole (FC) within The University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine must be analyzed thoroughly. Therefore, this research aims to analyze the importance of language attitudes, and how they affect the language revitalization of TFC, by evaluating UWI, St. Augustine's French-lexicon Creole courses and their contribution towards the possible revival of the language. This study's analysis has been achieved through the use of the grounded theory methodology because of its qualitative and systematic analysis. Purposive sampling was used as five past and present lecturers were interviewed and forty questionnaires were distributed through online platforms. These interviews were used as secondary data which produced concepts of language in education, language attitudes, language awareness, cultural teaching, cultural heritage, Creole events, field trips, and social identity, through the use of axial coding. These concepts were used in the analysis of the questionnaires which were analyzed as the primary data as it held the core phenomenon of the study. The phenomenon guided the study to produce the theoretical outcome. The results produced from both the primary and secondary data showed that language awareness through the education of TFC contributed to the cognitive development of students' emotional perception and motivation towards the revitalization of TFC. Therefore, the cognitive element of the students' language attitudes played the most significant role in influencing the students' connection to TFC and their subsequent revitalization efforts.
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    Bush versus Stush: Linguistic Stereotypes in Trinidad
    (2016-05-10) Thompson, Theron E.; Wright, Kristin
    Perceptual Dialectology (PD) is the branch of folk linguistics that deals with the regional distribution from the point of view of non-specialists (the “folk”). This study, Bush versus Stush: Linguistic Stereotypes in Trinidad, aims to build upon this premise by juxtaposing these perceived dialectal boundaries and actual (linguist-defined) dialectal variation variables so as to analyse whether or not they correlate. To do so, how people describe language variation, the geolinguistic stereotypes that exist and the linguist-demarcated isoglosses of Trinidad must be understood so as to answer the questions of “What are the Perceptions of Language variation in Trinidad?”. As nothing of its kind has ever been performed in Trinidad, this study intends to pioneer the field of PD regionally, and hopefully to inspire other studies of its kind. The findings revealed intrinsic links between perceived language variation and geographical location, language attitudes and stereotypes, perceived socio-economic class and language variation and ethnicity and stereotypical language use.