title: Socioeconomic Rivalry and National Competence in Ivory Coast.
abstract: Ivory Coast, a highly multilingual nation, continues to use French as the exclusive national language. Since French is seen as the key to economic advancement, and access to French has varied ethnically, Ivorians were expected to display sensitivity to variation in French competence, as people have shown toward linguistic variation in Canada and the United States. A modified matched guise technique, adapted to local circumstances, tested three groups of adult men (10 each): no formal education, primary school, and tenth grade. Comparison of the identity of the guises and the judgments of the respondents implied that achievement judgments were made first; ethnic labels were assigned later according to ethnic stereotypes, rather than the reverse. The study showed the emergence of positive norms, but not negative ones, in contrast to the Canadian and U.S. experiments, where social prejudices resulted in strong negative judgments as well. The results emphasize the importance of economic factors in overcoming potentially disruptive ethnolinguistic divisions.
authors.affiliation: a Departments of Linguistics and Sociology-Anthropology , Oakland University , USA.
authors.forename: Gayle H
authors.initials: GH
authors.lastname: Partmann