Actitudes lingüísticas en la Región de Murciainseguridad lingüística y prestigio encubierto

Abstract

As it happens with other dialects of the Spanish spoken in Spain, the dialectal variety of the Region of Murcia, located in the South of the country, suffers stigmatization. Its speakers show symptoms of covered prestige related to a normalization process (moderate standardization) and a sort of dialectal diglossia, which happens to be of especial interest regarding sociolinguistic studies in social psychology of language. Once the theoretical framework is delimited and the sociolinguistic situation of the object of study as well as our approach are introduced, this research focuses on language attitudes of Murcian speakers in order to clarify how prestige works within this community. Thus, language attitudes were observed regarding Spanish dialects from Spain, including the vernacular variety, formal settings and linguistic perception in connection with sociolects. Methodology is based on a survey spread online through the social media, which counts with 661 respondents. The data were studied according to the following variables: Sex, age, sex-age, geographic origin, parents' origin and level of qualification. The results confirm a great linguistic insecurity due to stigmatization, as well as linguistic solidarity towards other dialects and a covered prestige based on positive affective attitudes and negative cognoscitive attitudes, since speakers show a high esteem towards their vernacular variety despite the fact that they find it very incorrect. Key words: Murcia, Murcian variety, language attitudes, stigmatization, covered prestige, cognoscitive attitudes, affective attitudes, linguistic solidarity, dialects, linguistic perception, social networks.