No abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of child-directed speech during Flemish family dinner table interactions. Specifically, we study parents’ style-shifts, that is, their alternation between Standard Dutch and Colloquial Belgian Dutch, a non-standard supraregional variant of Dutch, when interacting with their children. By integrating insights and methods from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, we pay attention not only to macro-social categories (such as the age of the children), but also to the micro-social and pragmatic context (e. g. frames) of the style-shifts. The fact that this study focuses on a single case-study is a consequence of opting for this combination of course-grained quantitative analyses and fine-grained qualitative analyses. We rely on detailed transcriptions of three hours of recordings for one Flemish household with four children (age nine months, and four, five and seven years old). Our results reveal significant variation in the style-shifts of the mother (age 35) and the father (age 39) with respect to the four children. These results were interpreted against the background of comments made by the parents during a sociolinguistic interview that followed the recordings. Generally, our analyses allow us to provide a nuanced insight into the social meaning of the two language layers (Standard Dutch and Colloquial Belgian Dutch) as they are distributed across the speakers and situations in this family, thus revealing a link between the attested patterns of child-directed speech and the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms.

This paper aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the social meaning of a contemporary urban vernacular called Citétaal (Citélanguage). While most studies on the perception of urban vernaculars have applied qualitative discursive methods, we investigate the perception of and attitudes towards Citétaal by combining a qualitative and quantitative approach. In a discursive analysis of online surveys and social media networks, we analyze how this variety is perceived and represented on a collective level, and in comparison to other varieties, such as standard Dutch and regional Limburg Flemish. These insights are used to organize a speaker evaluation experiment ( n=95) in which we verify to what extent the various meanings in the indexical field of Citétaal occur on the individual level of the listener’s mind and how they are structured. We will also measure the listener’s ability to guess the speaker’s ethnic and regional origin. The qualitative data will be further used to interpret the results of the experiment. It will be shown that although social meanings of Citétaal strongly vary within the community, they are clearly regimented by prevailing standard language ideologies. Citétaal is still perceived as a vernacular spoken by foreign speakers, and its social meanings fluctuate between values of low social status and high attractiveness. The opposition (considered as distance) between speaker attractiveness and status is the highest for Citétaal and the lowest for standard Dutch, which suggests that social meanings of standard Dutch are more stable and widely accepted throughout the Flemish community. The conclusions highlight the importance of combining qualitative and quantitative methods when studying perceptions and attitudes in order to provide a fuller understanding of the social meaning of urban vernaculars in the larger community.

No abstract

In this article, we investigate social meaning as a determinant of linguistic diffusion by confronting laboratory and corpus data of Citétaal, a multi-ethnolect that has spread across Flanders. In a speaker evaluation experiment, we found that Citétaal was upgraded on ‘streetwise dynamism’, even by respondents unfamiliar with its migrant origin. From this, we conclude that it is Citétaal's third-order indexicality, pruned of ethnic associations, which carries the diffusion. To determine the relative importance of streetwise cool vis-à-vis other predictors, we studied the diffusion across Twitter of the principal Citétaal shibboleth (/s/ palatalisation). As a production proxy for streetwise cool, we included expressive compensation strategies such as lengthening (verrry), which turned out to be among the main predictors of the Citétaal form. We argue that social meaning is a major change determinant, and that Twitter is the optimum source to track both a diffusion and the factors, including social meaning, which drive it. (Rapid linguistic diffusion, social meaning, streetwise prestige, speaker evaluation experiment, corpus linguistics, Twitter)*

The aim of this paper is to examine the distribution of presentative constructions in contemporary Italian and to verify whether their occurrence depends on language external factors. Presentative constructions have been studied particularly by Italian linguists during the Eighties, and were defined as being 'typical' of so-called Neostandard Italian. The analysis is based on three corpora of contemporary Italian, viz. two oral corpora (LIP and CLIPS) and one written corpus (CORIS/CODIS).Counter to expectations, presentative constructions are far from frequent in contemporary Italian and therefore cannot be considered as being 'typical' of Neostandard Italian. They are, however, attested both in written and oral Italian, with a clear preference for the latter context, in which they are evenly distributed in formal and informal registers. We conclude by discussing the differences between the linguistic phenomena traditionally included into the 'feature pool' of Neostandard Italian.

No abstract

This article explores the linguistic and meta-linguistic heritage of the Italian mine workers families that arrived in Belgian Limburg after the Second World War. On the basis of historical research, discourse analysis of texts and sociolinguistic interviews, I describe how the complex linguistic integration of first-generation migrants, that was scarcely noticed and debated until the 1960s, has been picked up and enregistered by second- and third-generation Italians in Limburg. I show how first generation’s hybrid linguistic practices have come to be linked to one particular mining city, the city of Genk, and enregistered as an urban vernacular of this place, although they still refer to the larger historical background they are rooted in. I explain this heritage in three steps. First, I describe the complex contact-linguistic situation of first-generation miners’ families. I will then present the linguistic consequences of this situation, by describing the emergence of a multilingual, but mainly French-based mining jargon among Flemish and foreign miners. In a third step, I place the social and linguistic situation of first-generation miners at the root of the linguistic practices of second- and third-generation Italians in Limburg.