Explorando actitudes lingüísticas implícitas e explícitas: o caso galego

Abstract

This study presents a novel approach to investigating implicit and explicit attitudes towards Traditional Galician and Galician Spanish by means of data triangulation. Unlike prior research, we first depart from the Implicit Association Test (IAT) results to determine the participants’ implicit biases. Then, we carried out four semi-structured interviews as well as a focus group with six participants – selected according to the biases obtained in the IAT. The results indicate that implicit attitudes are less homogeneous than explicit ones, confirming that languages in Galicia continue to present a clear indexical value. Moreover, detected biases in the IAT predominantly align with linguistic variables, particularly family language and everyday language in different contexts. These results highlight the relationship between attitudes towards languages and language use. At an explicit level, the discourse is quite homogeneous, generally favorable to Galician, but primarily indeterminate. However, we detect the maintenance of certain prejudices among L-1 Castilian speakers, prejudices which L-1 Galician speakers are unable to challenge, placing themselves in the same framework as the former.