Language Stereotypes

11 Key excerpts on "Language Stereotypes"

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  Sociolinguistics / Soziolinguistik. Volume 1

  • Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier, Peter Trudgill, Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier, Peter Trudgill(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  This does not hold for the related term attitude (cf. art. 20), and so it may not be by accident that sociolinguistic research on prejudice and stereotypic beliefs about lan-guages and speakers is normally conducted under the label language attitudes. Before solving the definitional dilemma I will proceed to discuss the most common criteria used by different authors to define the term stereotype. The term was introduced by Lippman (1922), who used it in a rather broad sense but already included the aspects that stereotypes are evaluative or irrational in nature and that they govern expectations. He also implied that stereotypes are a kind of mental system, pictures in our heads. In other words, stereotypes are not identifyable with overt expressions (linguistic in nature or not), and the collection of stereotypes held by an individual is never a random selection. Successive research defines stereotypes as be-liefs (Harding et al. 1969, 4; Allport 1954; Katz/Braly 1967), judgments (Duiker/Frijda 1960, 115), mental images (Eichhorn et al. 1969, 485) or conceptual systems (Vinacke 1974). Among the special features used to distinguish stereotypes from other mental representations the following are the most common ones: Stereotypes are categories which overgeneralize and oversimplify (König 1967, 336; Bogardus 1950, 286), they are contrary to the facts or do not contain more than a kernel of truth (Hofstätter 1967, 207; Harding et al. 1969, 4; Katz/Braly 786 VI. Social Problems, Theoretical Approaches and Research Results 1935, 181), they are emotionally evaluative (Heintz 1957, 34; Dujker/Frijda 1960, 115; Allport 1958, 184; La Violette/Silvert 1951, 259), and they are characterized by persist-ence and rigidity, in other words, they are resistant to change in societies as well as in individuals (La Violette/Silvert 1951, 259).

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  Young Language Learners' Motivation and Attitudes

  Longitudinal, comparative and explanatory perspectives

  • Sybille Heinzmann(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Language Attitudes and Stereotypes 51 In order to develop attitudes towards what they perceive to be different, though, the children will clearly need some information about the groups in question. This kind of information is most likely provided by the socializing institutions of family and school. These findings tie in with stereotype research which has demonstrated that the cognitive processes underlying stereotype formation, such as categorizing, classifying and making biased attributions, emerge very early in childhood. Even preschool children are able to classify people along the dimensions of ethnicity, occupation and age. Of course, categorization does not yet represent a full-blown stereotype. In order for a stereotype to evolve, the perceiver needs to acquire some knowledge about the group in question and develop a set of beliefs about it. There is evidence that young children do acquire such knowledge. Parents provide their children with information about other social groups and even transmit stereotype content to them (Burwitz-Melzer and Quetz, 2006, p. 211; Mackie et al., 1996, pp. 46–7, 58, 61–2). By age five, for example, most children have begun to develop clear-cut racial attitudes and their ideas about racial groups are highly similar to those of their parents and friends (Mackie et al., 1996, pp. 46–7, 58, 61–2). 3.3 Research into language learners’ stereotypes of TL speakers Despite the legitimacy and usefulness of investigating students’ stereotypes of TL speakers in FL learning contexts, such attempts have been rather limited so far. El-Dash and Busnardo (2001b, p. 225) draw attention to the fact that stereo-types are a social psychological variable not yet explored to any great extent in FL acquisition studies. In this respect, as in many others, Gardner and Lambert had a pioneering role.

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  The Linguistic Worldview

  Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

  • Adam Glaz, David Danaher, Przemyslaw Lozowski(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Open Poland

    (Publisher)

  Edited by: Adam Głaz , David S. Danaher , Przemysław Łozowski 1 9 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 10 Stereotypes and V alues in the Linguistic Worldview Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska UMCS, Lublin, Poland 1. Stereotypes and Values: an O verview Ethnolinguistics investigates language in its relation to culture, group mentality, people’s beliefs and behaviors. Lublin ethnolinguistics, sometimes called cognitive (Nepop-Ajdaczyć, 2007; Vaňková, 2010; Zinken, 2009/2012), similarly to other Slavic ethnolinguistic schools (Nikita Tolstoy and Svetlana Tolstaya ’s dialectological school, Vyacheslav Ivanov’s and Vladimir Toporov’s etymological school), relates to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language as well as to the ideas of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in that it focuses on a reconstruction of the linguistic worldview, defined as an interpretation of the world contained in and accessible through language. In doing this, it follows the anthropological-cultural and cognitivist research paradigms. In describing the linguistic worldview, Bartmiński (2009/2012) and his collaborators introduced a few key “conceptual tools,” such as stereotype, the cognitive definition, profiling, viewpoint, the speaking subject , and values. Stereotypes are “segments” of the linguistic worldview, mental pictures of what something looks like, what it is like, how it functions (Lippmann, 1961 [1922]; Putnam , 1975). The cognitive definition is a tool for describing stereotypes : its role is to capture the language-entrenched categorization of phenomena, their characterizations and valuation, i.e. the way speakers understand a given entity. Profiling is a conceptual operation, performed in communicative acts, that consists in constructing variants of the base image of a given object. This is done with a certain intention and is definable in relation to styles and speech genres.

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  Stereotypes and Language Learning Motivation

  A Study of L2 Learners of Asian Languages

  • Larisa Nikitina(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) proposed that psychological functions are not independent entities that exist in isolation: these functions and processes are involved in a net of complex systemic relationships with each other (see Kozulin, 1990). In a similar way, Buck (2005) maintained that “in their fully articulated forms, emotions imply cognitions imply motives imply emotions, and so on” (cited in Dörnyei and Ryan, 2015, p. 11). This book fully acknowledges and agrees with these postulates. As discussed earlier, stereotypes function as an important cognitive tool that enables individual people to process new information in a more effective way (Lippmann, 1922/1965; McGarty, Yzerbyt and Spears, 2002). In addition to being an indispensable cognitive device, stereotypes incorporate people’s attitudes toward the stereotyped objects, social groups or phenomena (Greenwald and Banaji, 1995; Lippmann, 1922/1965; Spencer-Rodgers, 2001). Importantly, these attitudes can influence or shape people’s behavioural intentions and guide their actions (Forbes and Schmader, 2010; Greenwald and Banaji, 1995).

  This book considers an attitude as a property of a stereotype or as the language learners’ “likes and dislikes” embedded in their mental images of the target language countries. These attitudes, as Chapter 3 will explain in more detail, are measured in this study by favourability ratings that the respondents attached to each stereotypical image they had provided in their lists of images. To connect the dots between the three constructs in this study – stereotypes, attitudes and L2 motivation – the recognition that stereotypes incorporate individual people’s attitudes and have an ability to initiate a particular behaviour logically leads to a proposition that country stereotypes or mental images that language learners have about target language countries – and the learners’ attitudes embedded in these images – would play a role in shaping the students’ L2 motivation.

  Numerous studies in the field of applied linguistics have explored mental images of target language countries and cultures held by language learners. The researchers acknowledged that these ‘pictures in the head’ would “undoubtedly elicit stereotypes”; these stereotypes, in their turn, would allow having some valuable insights into the language learners’ attitudes toward the target language country, cultures and people (Storme and Derakhshani, 2002, p. 659). Methodologically, country stereotypes held by language learners have been explored through posing open-ended questions and gathering qualitative data. This approach was appropriate for the aims of the earlier studies, and it was employed by many researchers beginning from the earliest available inquiry by Taylor (1977) until more recent scholarly investigations by Byon (2007) and Drewelow (2013). However, the previous studies did not proceed to linking the explorations of the language learners’ mental imagery of the target language country to the learners’ language attitudes and L2 motivation. Only recently was such research initiated (Heinzmann, 2013; Nikitina, 2015). My own research conducted among learners of Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, French, German, European Portuguese, Russian and Spanish languages provided empirical evidence for the existence of positive and statistically significant associations between country stereotypes, language attitudes and L2 motivation (Nikitina, 2015). A study presented in the current book extends the explorations of the links between the three constructs to the learners of Asian languages. Besides extending the scope of the research, this book also recognizes that in order to enable methodological advancements in research on country stereotypes, a solid theoretical foundation would be required. The following section discusses some possible theoretical underpinnings.

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  Challenges in the Social Life of Language

  • John Edwards(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  (It is also worth remembering that stereotyping can operate in the opposite direction, too: those with the socially ‘right’ attributes may have their progress unfairly expedited.) In assembling evidence of linguistic stereotyping, and in language-at- titude studies generally, social psychologists have typically presented recorded voices to judges for evaluation. Broadly speaking, this has been done either directly, by finding appropriate representatives of each of the speech varieties to be investigated, or indirectly. The classic indi- rect approach has been the ‘matched-guise’ technique, first introduced by Lambert et al. (1960; see Edwards, 2009), in which the same person assumes two or more speech varieties. The obvious advantage here is that any purely idiosyncratic features (which might, for example, occur with the first, direct method) are held constant across speech samples; the assumption, then is that judges’ reactions must be to the variety Are Attitudes Important? 63 itself and not to any such distracting or confounding features. Overall, social-psychological insights and methodologies have produced a size- able body of evidence bearing on social perceptions, stereotypes and language attitudes. We can now predict with some confidence what sorts of reactions (in North America, say, or in Britain) will be elicited when people hear varieties of Black English, Newfoundland English, Cockney, ‘Received Pronunciation’, Boston English and many others. We can also make predictions about those varieties produced by non- native speakers of English that show the influence of the first language. We understand, at a general level, how these reactions come about, via the linguistic ‘triggering’ already noted, and how they reflect a set of attitudes (or beliefs) that listeners have of speakers.

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  Identity in Communicative Contexts

  • Kamila Ciepiela(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  National identity and stereotypes Stereotypes are “general representations of social phenomena”, which usually involve positive or negative value judgements (Berting / Villain-Gandossi 1995, p� 14)� Having sources in tradition and being strongly resistant to change, they help the user to produce simplified constructs of social reality (Berting / Villain- Gandossi, p� 14)� In many cases, they are linked to specific verbal representations, called labels, that act as stimuli activating them (Schaff 1981, pp� 80–81)� For example, the offensive label wop activates the negative stereotype of the Italians in America� Cognitive linguistics sees stereotypes as metonymic models used to make snap judgments about entire categories of people� For example, the American stereotype of The Drunken Irishman suggests that a typical Irishman is a person addicted to alcohol� Such reasoning is based on the metonymic model called sub- category for whole category (Lakoff 1987, p� 79; 1996, p� 10)� Similar models underlie signs for various country names and ethnic groups� They often reflect deeply-rooted stereotypes related to history, appearance, habits, folk culture, or social roles of their conceptual targets� It is also the case that stereotypes have to be analysed within the framework of the changing international relations� Some negative elements may remain dor- mant during periods which involve little conflict (Berting / Villian-Gandossi 1995, p� 24)� It is usually then that the perspective of political correctness makes some of the stereotypes and labels for them socially unacceptable�

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  Prejudice

  Its Social Psychology

  • Rupert Brown(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  expectancies and biases observed to associate with stereotypes. These expectancies and biases include both overt judgements and perceptions, presumably made under conscious control, and more subtle effects, which may occur even without our awareness. I shall also examine how the stereotypes we have of various groups – our own and others – are described in rather different linguistic forms. Then I shall discuss some of the psychological and contextual factors which have been shown to lead to increased or reduced use of stereotyping. Many of these effects occur in people’s minds – as biases in perception, cognition, memory or causal attribution – but it is important to recognize that they have behavioural consequences too. As we shall see in the final part of this section, in everyday social situations the operation of stereotypes can have very real implications for those who are its targets.

  Stereotypes and judgements of others

  A stereotype, whether prejudiced or not, is a cognitive association of a social category with certain characteristics. Most straightforwardly, then, we might expect that someone who possesses a stereotype about a group will, when encountering a particular individual from that group, attribute to that person the relevant stereotypical characteristics. On the basis of that attribution we might anticipate further consequences: the person concerned might be evaluated differently (in accordance with the stereotype) and hence judged to be a more or less suitable employee, tenant or whatever.

  The matter is a little more complicated than this, however. When we meet a real person we have at our disposal not just our preconceptions about their group membership, but also information about the way that person actually appears, dresses and behaves which may not be consistent with the group stereotype. How do we integrate these different pieces of information? This was one of the questions which Locksley and colleagues (1980) set out to investigate. They presented their participants with the transcript of a telephone conversation between two people, one of whom came across from his/her remarks either as decidedly assertive or as someone lacking in confidence. The sex of this target person was also varied. Subsequently participants were asked for their impression of the target’s personality and had to predict how the target would behave in some other hypothetical situations. If the participants’ sex stereotypes were operative, their judgements of the target should have been affected simply by switching the target’s sex (it is a widely held stereotype that men are more assertive than women). Surprisingly, altering the alleged sex of the target had almost no effect whatsoever on the judgements of him/her. The overriding factor was the behaviour of the person implied by the telephone conversation: in the ‘assertive’ condition the person was subsequently rated as more assertive and more masculine irrespective of their sex

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  The Perception of People

  Integrating Cognition and Culture

  • Perry R. Hinton(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Stereotypes, cognition and culture

  The curious case of stereotypes

  Ruggiero (2012, p. 119) captures a popular conception of stereotypes in his guide to critical thinking: “A stereotype is an overgeneralization that is especially resistant to change.” Stereotypes are mentioned frequently in the media, both on television and radio, as bad things. They are discriminatory; they are restrictive; they place people in strict categories and limit diversity and opportunity. In discussions and radio phone-ins the term ‘stereotype’ is viewed as a highly pejorative term, as expressed in statements such as: “don’t stereotype me”; “these young men were treated stereotypically”; “modern life does not fit into these old-fashioned stereotypes”; “she fought against the stereotype and finally achieved her goal”. Individuals and groups are applauded for demonstrating how wrong stereotypes are by taking on counter-stereotypical behaviour, such as a group of elderly people running marathons or starting up an online business. People who have succeeded against the odds, such as a woman coach of a professional male sports team, describe the stereotypes and other barriers they had to overcome to succeed. In other examples, such as in current affairs programmes and documentaries, it is shown how a particular ethnic or religious group is being stereotyped, with the resulting discrimination highlighted, and it is argued, for reasons of fairness and justice, that the prejudice should be stopped. Certainly in most Western cultures the social representation of stereotypes is that they should be avoided for these reasons. The general view is that people who stereotype need to realize the damage they are doing, learn the error of their ways and stop stereotyping. As stereotypes are overgeneralizations, this means that certain characteristics are applied to a person simply on the basis of their group membership – such as assuming that a particular elderly person will be frail and forgetful – which can result in negative discrimination, where the dynamic and healthy older person is denied a job (for which they are well qualified) based on this stereotypical assumption that they are frail and forgetful (which they are not). Hence stereotypes are not only overgeneralizations, but, as in this example, they are inaccurate judgements of the person, who is discriminated against, resulting in prejudiced rather than accurate decision-making, in that, in this case, the best-suited candidate is not given the job. Indeed, this view is supported by the research into stereotyping for much of the twentieth century. As Schneider (2004, p. 1) notes: “Stereotypes wear the black hats in social science”. For over fifty years people have been exhorted not to stereotype, and with certain specific stereotypes, particularly of gender and ethnicity, and possibly as a result of social change and the social sanctions against expressing them, their public expression has reduced. Recently, Fiske and Taylor (2013) have claimed that only around 10% of people in Western democracies hold extreme, blatant stereotypes, but they also argue that we all may be influenced by subtle stereotypes.

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  Conversational Routine

  Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech

  • Florian Coulmas(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Before considering the material of research under review and the clues it gives, one particularly interesting point in arguments on stereotypes should be mentioned. It has been noticed that native speakers and even some linguists are rather sensitive when the recurrence of stereotypes in speech is raised. It is an interesting phenomenon. If stereotypes really do recur in speech, they must be a result of some subconscious process because, otherwise, speakers who, in theory, find it offensive to their sense of pride would try to and, indeed, probably succeed in avoiding them. Furthermore, if the recurrence of stereotypes in speech is a subconscious act, then this points to some regularities, or, rather, peculiarities in the process of speaking. 56 Maria-Liudvika Drazdauskiene The present paper is based on the material rendered by spontaneous dialog and polylog in English and Lithuanian. Contrastive research has been under-taken to be able to draw at least a tentative conclusion of what is or may be a general trait in the process of speaking and what is a specific feature of a partic-ular language. The only drawback is that the material is somewhat limited in size. Less than five thousand cards, some containing very long unsegmented utterances, have been used to register the basic material of both languages in addition to the material of earlier research which was also made use of. However agreeable or disagreeable the idea of stereotypes in speech may be, it is a fact that some functional varieties of English are so typical in this respect that stereotypes are found to be the most distinct differential feature in them. This applies first and foremost to small talk. A considerable amount of stereotypes is also recurrent in prefaces, introductions and acknowledge-ments. In other words, stereotypes are typical in those texts in which the phatic function is dominant.

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  Cognitive Models in Language and Thought

  Ideology, Metaphors and Meanings

  • René Dirven, Roslyn Frank, Martin Pütz, René Dirven, Roslyn Frank, Martin Pütz(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The closer we get to home, the more re-fined are our perceptions. Actors can exploit this. For a non-New Yorker to assume a New York working-class accent which will be fully convincing to a native New Yorker is very difficult. Only the most talented actor from London can achieve a Scouse (Liverpool working-class) accent which will convince native Liverpudlians. But unless the audience consists of native New Yorkers or Liverpudlians respectively, they will be satisfied with something that is not authentic in every detail, providing only that it con-forms to the mental stereotype which they have already formed about the accent in question. Our perception gets less refined the further we get from home, but our passive competence is still impressive; it may fade, as accents get non-local, but it rarely becomes inexistent, just increasingly inaccu-rate. From the point of view of the participant which is categorized, the linguistic stereotype applied to his own categorization may seem imprecise and parodic, as exaggerated as the corresponding social stereotype, but if we progress towards a more hearer-oriented per-spective, stereotyped information actually turns out to be rather ac-curate. It constitutes a simple and highly efficient way to categorize and organize an extremely complex social environment. Let us then turn to the question of how stereotypes arise. If little has been written on linguistic stereotypes, there is quite a breathtak-ing amount of literature on social stereotypes. Social Identity Theory (Tajfel 1978; Tajfel & Turner 1979), for instance, views social stereotyping, the process of ascribing characteristics to people on the basis of their group memberships (Oakes et al. 1994: 1), as a How to do things with allophones 89 positive cognitive device which helps us systematize our social world. Tajfel and Turner based Social Identity Theory on the fol-lowing general assumptions: 1. Individuals strive to achieve or to maintain positive social identity.

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  Language and Nationality

  Social Inferences, Cultural Differences, and Linguistic Misconceptions

  • Pietro Bortone(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Although, as social psychologists stress, humans have also a tendency to see the traits of their own in-group in an unrealistically positive way, they may be unable Language and Nationality 36 to do so if the image of their group in the wider society is pervasively unfavourable. Members of social categories considered inferior or deviant tend to internalize a negative view of themselves, and to feel that their low status is justified. They may, in the same way, also espouse the prejudice against their own linguistic style expressed by the dominant community. The status of that community, and of its language usage, as ‘better’ comes to be accepted as objective and self-evident, and its superior position as logical, legitimate, and inevitable. This is hegemony in the Gramscian sense: the dominant community achieves and maintains power and control over the other groups by inducing them to adopt its view and to come to see their own subordinated position as warranted and natural. Speakers of non-standard (i.e. reputedly sub-standard) varieties of a language are likely to see someone’s native use of the standard language or accent as showing higher ability, intelligence, competence, and finesse, instead of seeing how socioeconomic power has created such impression (a méconnaissance in Bourdieu’s sense). The mechanism is circular: the continued ascendancy of the standard language presupposes the acceptance of its alleged superiority also by those disadvantaged by it. Internalized linguistic prejudice has also other consequences, important for linguists. One is that self-reported usage becomes unreliable. As much behavioural research confirms, there is a general human tendency to misperceive one’s conduct as being virtuously in line with received standards. As a result, while some non-standard speakers are self-deprecatory about their own speaking style, others affirm proudly (but mistakenly) that they would never use non-standard features.

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