Language choices and social attitudes are in a mutually reinforcing relationship: attitudes shape the language choices people make, and language choices reflect and reinforce the attitudes that society holds about groups and their members.
Social attitudes are evaluative beliefs that communities hold about people, groups, behaviours and — crucially — language varieties. These attitudes shape language behaviour in several powerful ways:
When a community holds positive attitudes toward a variety, speakers tend to maintain or adopt its features. When attitudes are negative, speakers may suppress or abandon features — or maintain them as a form of resistance.
Social attitudes are a primary driver of language change:
- Prestige-driven change: speakers adopt forms associated with high-prestige groups (upward convergence)
- Identity-driven maintenance: speakers maintain or even exaggerate community features when their identity is threatened (divergence, covert prestige)
- Attitude shifts driving change: as society’s attitudes toward a group change, the social value of their linguistic features may shift too
KEY TAKEAWAY: Understanding the relationship between attitudes and language choices is not just academically interesting — it has real social consequences. Language attitudes justify discrimination, educational inequality and social exclusion. Analysing this relationship is an act of social awareness.
Language choices do not merely respond to external attitudes — they also express the speaker’s own social attitudes:
Vocabulary choices reveal attitudes:
- Using chairperson rather than chairman reflects an egalitarian attitude toward gender and work
- Using a particular slang term signals attitude toward the in-group it belongs to
- Using a dysphemism (snuffed it, croak) rather than a euphemism reveals an attitude toward the topic (irreverence, dark humour)
Accent choices reveal attitudes:
- A politician adopting broader features signals an attitude of connection to “ordinary Australians”
- A speaker suppressing ethnic accent features in formal contexts may signal awareness of — and compliance with — dominant social attitudes
Discourse choices reveal attitudes:
- Interrupting or speaking over someone signals an attitude of dominance or authority
- Extensive hedging may signal deference or uncertainty
- Direct, unhedged language may signal confidence or aggression
EXAM TIP: When you identify a language choice, always ask: What social attitude does this choice reflect? Is the speaker signalling their own attitude (toward a group, topic or situation) or responding to an external social attitude (about what is appropriate, prestigious or acceptable)?
The relationship is circular:
Breaking this cycle requires conscious awareness and deliberate language policy choices.
SAE and educational success: the social attitude that SAE is the only appropriate variety for formal education means that speakers of non-SAE varieties are disadvantaged in literacy assessment. Their language choices in assessment are shaped by this attitude, and the assessment results then reinforce attitudes about their “language ability.”
Gender and language attitudes: the social attitude that women “talk too much” or are “more polite” leads to scrutiny of women’s language that is not applied to men. Women may choose language strategies in response to this scrutiny.
Youth language and intergenerational attitudes: the social attitude that youth language is degenerate or sloppy leads to prescriptivist correction. Young people’s language choices — maintaining slang — can be both a response to community attitudes (covert prestige) and resistance to intergenerational pressure.
COMMON MISTAKE: Students sometimes present the attitude → language direction as one-way. Always remember the bidirectionality: language choices both reflect attitudes and reinforce them. A media outlet that consistently uses particular vocabulary to describe a group is not merely expressing an attitude — it is helping to create and sustain it.
Negative language attitudes can lead to real social disadvantage:
- Employment discrimination: accent discrimination in hiring
- Legal disadvantage: speakers of non-SAE varieties in legal contexts
- Educational disadvantage: assessment practices that privilege SAE literacy
- Healthcare disparities: communication barriers between patients and providers
These consequences make the study of language attitudes socially significant, not merely academic.
APPLICATION: When you encounter language commentary in public discourse — a letter to the editor complaining about language change, a political speech about immigration and language — analyse it as a social attitude in action. What language is being valued? What is being stigmatised? Whose interests are served?
VCAA FOCUS: VCAA Unit 4 AOS 2 requires students to understand how social attitudes and language choices are interconnected. Be ready to explain this relationship, give Australian-specific examples, and analyse specific texts for evidence of how attitude shapes language choice and vice versa.
