Public and private language ideologies as reflected in language attitudes on the Island of Korcula

Since languages are such powerful means of group identification, they may be considered as constitutive of communities. Attitudes expressed toward certain linguistic varieties may thus be perceived as attitudes held toward respective community-members. However, as attitudes are not always easily accessible, and are rarely one-dimensional but rather multi-layered, an insight into overt (publicly proclaimed) and covert (privately held) ideologies can enhance understanding of language attitudes and their meaning. This paper brings the analysis of these two types of attitudes held by adolescents in three most populated places on the island of Korcula, Croatia. The analysis is based on the results obtained by means of a questionnaire eliciting, among other things, overt attitudes toward six local, regional and supra-regional varieties, and covert attitudes toward judges' local speech and the Standard variety of Croatian. Although the results confirm some expected tendencies in the evaluation of different varieties, subsequently conducted analysis of speech recognition rates offers some valuable insights and interesting implications for further interpretation of the results.