Implicit language attitudes among young, white, L1-Afrikaans speakers towards two South African Englishes: The role of gender and family language

Abstract

This paper reports on an Implicit Association Test (IAT)-based investigation of the language-attitudes of the white (Afrikaans and English) speech-communities of South Africa, with a focus on young, L1-Afrikaans speakers. Drawing from an extensive literature review, two hypotheses were formulated: 1) participants would exhibit out-group bias towards Standard South African English over Afrikaans-accented English; 2) contextually relevant socio-demographic and sociolinguistic factors would explain this bias. Contrary to the first hypothesis, L1-Afrikaans speakers showed an implicit bias towards their in-group accent. Gender and Family Language emerged as significant factors in explaining these results. More specifically, females were found to show significantly more in-group bias than men, while subjects reporting both English and Afrikaans as family languages showed the most in-group bias. Given that the outcomes from this implicit approach provide new insights, further research into the role of gender and language-loyalty within this speech-community through narrative-based elicitation methods is recommended.