286 Raphael Berthele
- Conclusions
The goal of this contribution is to make three related points. Firstly, I have
tried to show that a “cognitive turn” in the research on language attitudes
and, more generally in the research on folk models of language, opens up
new perspectives on old issues such as sociolinguistic prestige and esthetic
evaluations of languages and varieties. Whereas standard sociolinguistics
often keeps looking at the social value of particular varieties and variants in
a monodimensional fashion (i.e. in terms of the high-low relationship), a
cognitive study of the folk’s mental models of languages and varieties re-
veals the multidimensionality and perspective-dependency of linguistic
prestige. Hence, cognitive sociolinguistics is an adequate framework for the
study of the cultural and mental models that set the stage for the sociolin-
guistic processes observed in empirical sociolinguistics. Secondly, I have
tried to show that the use of visual stimulus material enables us to shed
some new light on what I propose to call the “gestalt” representations of
languages and varieties. The method presented in section 2 certainly can be
improved: there is no doubt that it should and could be systematically de-
veloped and adapted to other sociolinguistic situations. The bubble task
clearly bears a certain danger of circularity, since we do not know which
ones of the attributes given by the participants are indeed related to a men-
tal representation of the sound pattern of a particular variety and which
ones might rather be triggered by the visual stimuli only. The actual rea-
sons for the mappings from stimuli to varieties might be mysterious or
more random than what the data discussed here suggest. Thus, the patterns
discovered here must continue to be confronted with other evidence such as
the one cited from Ris (1992) in section 2.3. Converging evidence also
seems to emerge from Cuonz’ (2008) study, where at least some of the
same attributes as those described above are collected without any visual
support whatsoever.
The evidence in section 2 seems to support the idea of consistent and re-
current visual correlates of mental models of languages and varieties. The
third point was to give new support for the inherent value hypothesis that
usually gets (prematurely) discarded by professional linguists – but not by
the folk. So it may well be that what is believed to be a simple stanko, e.g.
the “spiky” quality of certain varieties, turns out to have a solid and univer-
sal grounding in perception. But obviously, the evidence presented here
cannot be more than a kick-off for a new and cognitively realistic consider-
ation of these old questions.