Language Attitudes 5
words, the same changing linguistic landscape can have socially beneficial effects - at least on
certain dimensions - for both in- and outgroups.
In sum, “although the Hispanic population is growing significantly, and their presence is
felt in the mass media and linguistic landscape of some communities, their political and
socioeconomic power is still very limited” (Barker et al., 2001, p. 16). Our study then, had two
aims. First, we wished to ascertain the intergroup attitudes of Anglo and Hispanic Californian 8
th
and 9
th
graders to (male and female) Anglo- and Hispanic-accented speakers. The sociopolitical
backdrop provided above is equivocal as to what attitudes these adolescents would be predicted
to hold. For this reason, the design included, arguably, the most comprehensive set of trait
attributional factors used in this research domain to date, namely seven. Second, we wished to
determine if there was any direct relationship between our teenagers’ perceptions of the
ethnolinguistic make-up of their linguistic landscape and their language attitudes. Again, our
measure of linguistic landscape was broad and comprehensive, including 28 items relating to
extent of Spanish in the local (see Bourhis & Sachdev, 1984) media, signage, neighborhood,
school, and so forth (see Bourhis & Landry, 1997, on the close relationship between their
measures of linguistic landscape and media).
Method
Participants
Of the 238 students from the Santa Ynez High School Union who participated, 190 cases
were retained for analysis. Having invited respondents to declare their ethnicity on the
questionnaire, several cases were excluded due to substantial missing data or questionable
responses (i.e., response set). A small percentage (11.7%) of the students were of various
ethnicities other than Anglo or Hispanic and, thus, were also excluded from the analysis. Forty of
Convention