Context matters

Abstract

This paper presents the results of two largely parallel verbal guise studies that elicited students’ attitudes toward different standard varieties of English. The studies were conducted in the small anglophone Caribbean island country of Grenada. The two studies were contextualized in the domains of education and newscasting, respectively, with the aim of finding out how language attitudes are influenced by context in societies where different endo- and exonormative standards are of relevance. As hypothesized, the results revealed strong differences between the evaluations of speakers of the two domains and confirm that contextualization is crucial in language attitude research. Against previous hypotheses, however, the acceptance of endonormative standard accents was stronger in the more globally open context of newscasting than in the more locally restricted domain of education. The results are discussed against the background of the sociolinguistic situation in Grenada and inform on endonormativity and norm orientation in one of the underresearched island countries of the anglophone Caribbean.