No book of this size can do justice to the huge amount of work in the field of language attitudes. However, the chapters of this book have at least provided introductory coverage to the scope, importance and pervasiveness in social life of attitudes towards language, covering some of the main areas of research as the field has evolved, along with methodological and theoretical approaches, developments and debates.

We have seen how language attitudes may be created or reinforced by the ways in which realities are represented through language ideologies, stereotypes, and also the many myths about language. We have also seen how we might see clues to language attitudes from our physical communication environments, such as in advertisements, street signs, and our linguistic landscapes, as well as in our everyday social interactions. We have seen how attitudes may be evidenced in angry complaints relating to what is correct and incorrect, appropriate or inappropriate, acceptable and unacceptable in language use, in political action to save endangered languages or to introduce more socially sensitive, politically correct forms, in lack of co-operation or even violent reactions, and in prejudices that can intrude into many areas of social life, including professional environments. Language attitudes can drive change, both in the way that languages themselves may change over time, and also at the individual level when people are prepared to direct considerable dedication and sums of money to modify their own language behaviours through such processes as accent reduction programmes.