Attitudes towards trilingualism: a comparison between the Basque and Irish contexts

Abstract

This paper aims to examine attitudes towards trilingualism by focusing on the minority language (Basque in Basque Country and Irish in Ireland) and the L3 (English in the Basque Country and French, Spanish, or German in Ireland). The participants are 1,087 Basque university students and 250 Irish third-level students. By using the same questionnaire--- based on Baker (1992) ---both in the Basque Country and Ireland, the research aims to explore attitudes in two contexts which share some similarities while at the same time retaining their own sociolinguistic features. Thus, it is expected that the level of proficiency in the minority language will exert a clearly positive impact on attitudes to Irish and Basque. Similarly, it is hypothesized that different attitudes to the L3 will be shown in both contexts for different sociolinguistic reasons.