Using emojis to assess children’s linguistic stereotypes about Italian regional varieties

Abstract

Linguistic stereotypes emerged both in relation to biological and social factors. Different studies have offered different methodologies to ascertain their emergence in children or even babies. In this paper, we present a survey on six Italian regional varieties tested on 79 children aged from 6 to 10 years old. The survey took place in two elementary schools and used a paper questionnaire in which emojis were used to express different values to be associated with different accents. Our results show that this method was reliable for studying linguistic stereotypes, even in children with a low level of literacy due to their age.

Keywords

• linguistic stereotype
• language attitude
• italian
• accent study
• sociolinguistics