Hong Kong Tertiary Students’ Language Attitude towards an unknown language with and without UK and Nigeria labels

Résumé ou Introduction

Language is neutral but with social factors will become significant to people’s background and their impression to others. Different gender, socioeconomic status, as well as religion will have different language choices and language preference, so-called language attitude. Apart from these reason, nationality is also an influential variable. Language is divided into superiority and inferiority such as English is the most popular and people are eager to learn. Because of military power, economy, and international status if its adapted countries, it acts as lingua franca that mean a common medium of communication for the speakers from different countries. It indicated that people tend to choose advanced countries’ language. Nonetheless, this is just an observation to English by sociologist. This research was designated to study the feelings and perceptions of people towards some rare and strange languages, like Kanuri and Welsh. Supposedly, Kanuri that used in Nigeria would not be welcomed so much by people while Welsh that used in United Kingdom would be positively thought by others. Then, through the pattern of interviewees’ description on the languages, and the contrast of interviewees’ reaction after letting them know the origin of the languages, one of discussion in this research that was to find whether the reputation of countries affect people’s perception of the languages would be revealed. Also, this research would like to study the relationship between the degree of acceptance of various language of the interviewees and the number of acquired languages besides the biliteracy and trilingualism in Hong Kong.