Pushing boundaries in the measurement of language attitudes: enhancing research practices with the L'ART Research Assistant app

The importance of methodological developments has recently been emphasized both in language attitude research specifically (Kircher & Zipp 2022), and across linguistics and the social sciences more broadly, where there has been a particular focus on replicability (Sönnig & Werner 2021; Kobrock & Roettger 2023). One aspect of this concerns the adoptions of more open, consistent, and comparable implementations of method.
We introduce a new digital application (the L’ART Research Assistant) for research in multilingualism and language attitudes. The app is specifically dDesigned specifically for work with bilingual populations who speakspeaking a majority and a regional/minority/minoritized/heritage language, the app implementing implements reference versions of some commonly used research methods and tasks. This offers benefits tobenefits the research community by enhancing consistency and comparability within and across studies and by improving replicability and reproducibility.
We discuss technical and methodological considerations behind the app and illustrate its use with a brief case study of language attitudes across three European communities whose regional/minority languages receive radically different degrees of socio-political recognition: Lombard (Italy), Moselle-Franconian (Belgium), and Welsh (UK). This The case study demonstrates not only how the app facilitates research across different communities that is easily comparable, but our results also reveal fundamental differences in attitude scores depending on the methods used employed (AToL v. MGT). Consequently, we argue that there is a need to move toward both the adoption of more consistent, comparable methods as well as toward a more holistic approach to measuring language attitudes, where a battery of tests — as opposed to a single measure — should become the norm.