‘I Don’t Want to Understand You’: The Effect of Attitudes towards Frisian on its Intelligibility

Fryslân has been proposed as the perfect setting for Receptive Multilingualism (RM) (Belmar & Pinho, 2020). Introducting this might however be problematic due to negative attitudes towards Frisian (Hilton & Gooskens, 2013) as it has been found that negative attitudes towards a language can result in a lower intelligibility (Schüppert et al., 2015). It is therefore important to understand the relationship between attitudes and intelligibility before introducing RM in Fryslân. To investigate this relationship, overt and covert attitudes of 34 Dutch-speaking adults were measured (Mage = 34) via a survey containing a Matched Guise Test (MGT), and intelligibility was tested via a cloze test. It was expected that negative attitudes caused a lower intelligibility. The data suggests a significant effect of covert attitudes on intelligibility and a near-significant effect of overt attitudes on intelligibility. The findings implicate that before introducing RM in Fryslân, it is necessary to improve attitudes.