Actitudes lingüísticas de los bogotanos : hacia los dialectos del español hablado en Colombia y las variedades nacionales de esta lengua en los demás países de Hispanoamérica

The aim of this study is to describe the linguistic attitudes in people from Bogota towards
the dialects of Spanish in Colombia and the national varieties of it in other countries of
Latin America.

This project follows the research parameters of the project Linguistic identity and Attitudes
in Spanish-speaking Latin America (LIAS)—funded by the Research Council of Norway—
and applies LIAS methodology in Colombia. 400 Speakers from Bogotá were interviewed
using a questionnaire with 41 questions. Informants were selected taking into account
variables such as socioeconomic status, age and sex, and in proportion to the demographic
composition of Bogotá reported in 2005-2006.

The surveys were conducted with direct method, since this inquires directly into the
informants’ attitudes and manners. As the survey comprises open and close questions, and
there are also questions with an option to explain or justify the answer, quantitative and
qualitative analyses were applied.

In the case of the questions about Colombian national varieties, it was necessary to
organize the regions according to the geographic distribution of dialects and superdialects
posited in the Atlas Lingüístico-Etnográfico de Colombia [Linguistic and Etnographic
Atlas of Colombia].

The descriptions about Spanish national varieties belong to the countries: Argentina,
Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Spain, Guatemala,
Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Dominican republic,
Uruguay and Venezuela and Belize.

In some questions, there were emerging categories of description and analysis such as:
phonetics, lexical-semantics, morphosyntactics, spelling, comprehension, communication,
standard language, contextualization, politeness, media, truth, affection, reasoning, ethics,
identity, linguistic identity, culture.

The chapter of conceptual framework has five subjects: (1) Linguistic attitudes, (2)
linguistic identity, (3) standard variety, (4) language policy and planning, and (5)
Characterization of Colombian Spanish. The interest of exposing these issues is related to
language attitudes in the way that speakers focus their use or interact with others and with
their linguistic varieties; this supports the descriptions and analyses of the linguistic
attitudes found in the answers given by the respondents.

The chapter of analysis has seven subjects: (1) The positive and negative attitudes towards
Spanish dialects in Colombia; (2) the names given by the respondents to the language they
speak; (3) the attitudes about linguistic correctness in the Latin American countries; (4) the
perceptions of linguistic similarities and differences in the varieties of Spanish spoken in
Latin American countries; (5) the dialectal preferences of the media in Latin American
countries; (6) the forms of address and the degrees of liking, disliking, ignorance levels and
indifference that respondents display towards national varieties of Spanish in Latin
American countries; and (7) the associations that informants make between Latin American
countries and features like anger, technology, elegance, high economic resources, respect,
affection, authority, vulgarity and sense of humor.