Abstract
Language attitude is a term primarily used in sociopsychology. However, it is also used in sociolinguistics, and especially in the discipline of language planning. Linguistic attitudes are considered to contain three cognitive, affective and behavioural components, i.e. knowledge about language, affections towards language, and behaviour towards language. This study is primarily aimed at assessing linguistic attitudes of Tehrani Persian speakers. The three components of attitude are assessed according to different relevant linguistic aspects ( i.e. corpus, status, and language-in-education) in both spoken and written codes. In order to achieve this goal a questionnaire has been devised. Different corpus issues (e.g. phonetic and spelling, lexical, morphological, syntactic and discoursal language planning processes such as codification, standardization, renovation, etc.), status issues (language as an instrument and language as an affectional entity), and acquisition challenges are some of the main items touched in the questionnaire. The study aims at answering the following questions: What is/are the most important constructional component(s) of Tehrani Persian speakers linguistic attitudes? Which of the mentioned linguistic issues has the least effect on the construction of Tehrani Persian speakers’ attitudes? How do the answers to the two mentioned questions contribute to the formation of covert and overt policy? Linguistic attitudes of four groups of Tehrani Persian speakers (high school students, university students, university lecturers and Persian Academy members) are assessed to answer the last question. The linguistic attitudes of the first three groups are considered as covert linguistic policy, in contrast to the linguistic attitudes of the last group (i.e. Persian academy members) as indicators of overt policy. The theoretical foundations and methodology of the study greatly depend on Perry (1985), Ager(2001), Oakes(2000) and Schiffman(2006), and are integratively implemented in the analysis of linguistic attitudes of Tehrani Persian speakers.
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