From a multiperspective view (students, teachers, administrators and university management), the paper will deal with language use and language attitudes towards standard languages and regional varieties at an Austrian middle size university. A mixed methods approach can show how elite language ideologies meet everyday academic language use.
Universities strive for internationalisation and at the same time, they recruit the majority of their students as well as administrators in their geographical neighbourhood. Standard language ideologies (Davies 2012) are seen as justified and appropriate in academic contexts. This creates a "monolingual/monovarietal habitus (the standard national language) plus English" that is widely accepted in many countries. In this context language attitudes (Garrett 2010) are more relevant for the assumptions behind language use (Coupland/Jaworski 2004) than the official language policies of the universities are. The paper will present a multiperspective analysis of language use and language attitudes towards standard languages and regional varieties in different academic contexts of a middle size university in Austria.
Online questionnaires and post hoc questionnaires (filled in after lessons and interactions with administrators) indicate general tendencies of (reported) language use, while interviews show the way in which language ideologies are unfolded in interaction (Liebscher/Dailey-O'Cain 2009, Cuonz 2014). The analysis points out how different stakeholders prefer different arguments for/against varieties as well as mono-/multilingualism and how they perceive the academic linguistic repertoire (Busch 2012).
References:
Busch, B. 2012. The Linguistic Repertoire Revisited. Applied Linguistics 33(5). 503–523.
Coupland, N. & A. Jaworski, eds. 2004. Metalanguage. New York: De Gruyter.
Cuonz, C. 2014. Was kann die diskursive Spracheinstellungs forschung (nicht)? methodologische und epistemologische Überlegungen. In C. Cuonz & R. Studler (eds.), Sprechen über Sprache: Perspektiven und neue Methoden der Spracheinstellungsforschung, 31–64. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Davies, W. 2012. Myths we live and speak by. Ways of imagining and managing language and languages. In M. Hüning et al. (eds.), Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History, 45-69. Amsterdam, NLD: John Benjamins
Garrett, P. 2010. Attitudes to Language. Cambridge. CUP.
Liebscher, G. & J. Dailey-O'Cain. 2009. Language attitudes in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(2). 195–222.
