Geographic and sociopolitical influences on language ideology and attitudes toward language variation in post-unification Germany.

Theoretical work on language ideology has provided a great deal of insight into the nature of language ideology and how it affects and is affected by society. Empirical study of the components of language ideology, however, requires examination of non-linguists' attitudes toward language variation. This dissertation investigates the language attitudes of present-day Germans in the wake of unification, in an attempt to gain insight into the effects of this complex socio-political situation on these perceptions and beliefs. This study employs an adaptation of a perceptual dialectological methodology which was designed to gain access to geographically-based perceptions of language variation on a large scale. A verbal survey was administered to 218 Germans in forty-four different towns throughout the country during the summer of 1995. Informants were asked to rate the levels of 'correctness', 'pleasantness', and 'similarness' for varieties of German spoken in various regions of the country, and drew their perceptions of the German dialect boundaries on a blank map of the country. Then the same 218 informants conversed informally in small groups for half an hour about their attitudes toward language variation. Both the quantitative and the qualitative data are used as evidence supporting the study's hypotheses, and are intended to supplement each other. This data reveals important differences between westerners' and easterners' views on where 'standard' German is spoken, and several social factors are also found to play a role in these differences. Despite the differences, however, the findings also reveal a growing level of similarity in westerners' and easterners' language attitudes, as compared to a similar study undertaken only one year earlier. It is also found that westerners perceive more differences between western and eastern varieties with respect to 'correctness', 'pleasantness', and 'similarness' than easterners do, although westerners and easterners alike perceive differences in the map task. Reasons for and results of these findings are explored, with reference to previous work in language attitudes, language ideology, and in language and discrimination.Ph.D.European historyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsLinguisticsPolitical scienceSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130223/2/9721966.pd