Bilingualism and Youth Language

Dorleijn, Margreet; Nortier, Jacomine

doi:10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0103

Cited by 3 publications

References 11 publications

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Chapter 5. Multilingual acquisition across the lifespan as a sociohistorical trigger for language change

Aalberse

2024

Lifespan Acquisition and Language Change

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Language contact implies more variation in language use, both in the individual and in the community. This increased variation can accelerate language change, but it can also halt it (Aalberse et al. 2019; Muysken 2013). Which parts of language do change, and which parts do not depends on cognitive and social factors: the change or non-change should be cognitively possible and socially acceptable. What is cognitively possible or cognitively likely partly depends on the age of the language user. What is socially desirable is also partly dependent on age. This chapter provides an overview of bilingual speaker optimization strategies inspired by Muysken (2013), relating preferences for a type of strategy to life stages. The chapter ends with a discussion on the challenges and opportunities of combining the lifespan acquisition perspective with the historical sociolinguistics of language contact.

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Chapter 5. Multilingual acquisition across the lifespan as a sociohistorical trigger for language change

Aalberse

2024

Lifespan Acquisition and Language Change

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Review of King & Carson (2016): The multilingual city: Vitality, conflict and change

Nuessel

2016

LPLP

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C’est trop auch! The Translation of Contemporary French Literature Featuring Urban Youth Slang

Linn

2016

IJLL

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The French post-colonial novel has recently been witnessing the emergence of urban youth language or français contemporain des cités (Goudaillier 2001). This linguistic variety allows underprivileged youths from multi-ethnic suburbs to rebel against authority by deliberately violating standard language norms. Its characteristics include frequent lexical input from immigrant languages, in particular Arabic and English, and the use of verlan at the morphological level, with the latter involving a form of back slangusing syllabic inversion, which can be recurrently applied to heighten its coding function. In view of the social rejection of this ‘antilanguage’ (Halliday 1978), it has had difficulty penetrating into literature. However, this is now beginning to change, with urban youth discourse appearing in a number of novels, mostly by young ‘post-migration’ writers (Geiser 2008), such as Faïza Guène, Insa Sané and Rachid Djaïdani. While this language variety has mainly been dealt with by sociolinguists, some of the novels concerned are now crossing borders, and a multi-disciplinary approach to this phenomenon is now called for, combining linguistic, literary and translatological tools.The transfer of this heterolingual genre does indeed raise a number of issues. For example, if we assume that translation is a cultural-political practice (Venuti 2008), what options do translators have to convey the resistant discourse of young immigrant slang users? How will the relationship between language use and social identity manifest itself in the target text? And how can a contrastive linguistic analysis of the features of urban youth language help to resolve translation problems? I will draw on a corpus of French and Dutch novels as well as some translations from French in an attempt to answer these questions.

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Bilingualism and Youth Language

Abstract: In this contribution we will give an introduction to the linguistic behavior of young people in ethnically mixed groups, often referred to as youth language or multiethnolects.

Cited by 3 publications

References 11 publications

Chapter 5. Multilingual acquisition across the lifespan as a sociohistorical trigger for language change

Chapter 5. Multilingual acquisition across the lifespan as a sociohistorical trigger for language change

Review of King & Carson (2016): The multilingual city: Vitality, conflict and change

C’est trop auch! The Translation of Contemporary French Literature Featuring Urban Youth Slang

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