Research project Prison Officers' Attitudes to Linguistic Variation (POALV)
This project investigates the folk linguistic beliefs, perceptions, and language attitudes held by prison staff toward the prisoners’ ways of speaking in a Swedish prison. We aim to provide an understanding of the linguistic situation in a prison setting, and in doing so contribute to sociolinguistic theory and practice in an understudied area.
This three-year project builds on sociolinguistic variationist tradition of researching language variation and attitudes. No previous research has investigated prison officers' language attitudes towards different the speech styles they encounter in a prison setting, however previous research has revealed accent bias among the general population. The possible negative consequences of such bias increases as the listener is a potential gatekeeper.
In POALV, language attitudes are investigated using a systematic, large-scale incremental design made up of four studies:
- a folk linguistic design where prison officers describe the semiotic landscape in the prison and the different personae of the inmates
- an experimental study testing implicit attitudes, using the verbal guise technique and an implicit association task
- a survey to elicit explicit attitudes
- reflexive group interviews.
In this project, attitudes towards different speech styles in a prison setting are investigated using a systematic, large-scale incremental design. We build on a vast body of sociolinguistic variationist research on language attitudes, such as Bijvoet (2018) on attitudes of gatekeepers in Sweden, Maegaard & Pharao (2021) on indexicality of certain speech features, and Eckert (2019a, 2019b) on how language index social meaning.
Further building on the concept of the personae (D’Onofrio, 2020) and how these are
stereotyped, we investigate the different indexical values that are attributed to different speech styles as described by prison officers. D’Onofrio suggests investigating this using the verbal guise technique.
The study will contribute to the theoretical discussion on implicit and explicit language
attitudes, and the methodological choices made to investigate these (Pharao &
Kristiansen, 2019 by comparing two instruments used to elicit implicit attitudes (the Verbal Guise Test and the Implicit Association Task) and contrasting the findings with results from a survey designed to measure explicit attitudes. Further, the project as a whole will contribute to methodological development of the study of language attitudes and how these may be altered through reflexive group discussions where participants are made aware of their own biases (cf. Subtirelu & Lindemann, 2016; Jeong, Lindemann, Forsberg & Ribbeklint, 2025).
The project will render new knowledge about a closed sociolinguistic ecosystem, where participants’ language attitudes towards prisoners as well as their description of the linguistic situation in the prison are investigated. This ties into previous findings of certain speech styles associated with foreign background indexing criminality and nonconformity for some listeners (see Maegaard & Pharao, 2021; Gross & Boyd, 2022; Jonsson, 2013).
However, as participants are prison officers who work with prisoners of many different
backgrounds, comparing their attitudes to those of the general public (through other
studies) will provide nuance to pre-existing knowledge of the indexical links between
criminality and speech variation in Swedish.