Exploring the social meaning of contemporary urban vernaculars: Perceptions and attitudes about Citétaal in Flanders

Abstract

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.

Self-assessment and standard language ideologies: bilingual adolescents in Sweden reflect on their language proficiencies

“…The fact that participants refer to standard Swedish (as opposed to slang use, anglicisms, youth language, for example) as an abstract referee when discussing their own language use also tells us that the awareness of referees does not only involve the differences in language proficiency, but indeed also social differences (cf. Madsen and Svendsen 2015;Marzo 2016).…”

“…In a number of studies, participants express attitudes towards language by using value terms, and positioning themselves in relation to other speakers, making their ideologies concerning language (standard and non-standard) very visible. In their Copenhagen interviews, Madsen and Svendsen (2015) found that adolescents label ways of speaking which they do not themselves report using as 'integrated ', 'sophisticated', 'academic', 'privileged', etc. At the other end of the spectrum, Marzo (2016) found that, while Citétaal, an urban Flemish vernacular used in former ghettoised areas, is generally stigmatised and associated with negative values, it is nevertheless associated with positive values carrying prestige, such as speaker attractiveness, coolness and humour. Trudgill (1972, 184) found that, in Norwich, male speakers associate working class, non-standard speech with covert positive values and prestige.…”

Intonation and levels of agreement in interactions between Swedish adolescents

“…Madsen & Svendsen (2015) find that adolescents in diverse urban neighbourhoods in Norway and Denmark sometimes distance their own speech from that of 'integrated', 'sophisticated', or 'privileged' speakers. Marzo (2016) investigates the covert prestige of an urban vernacular of Flemish and finds that listeners consider Citétaal as a variety used by foreign speakers of Dutch, and that even within the speech community, not all listeners equate social values expressed through speech with speaker attractiveness. Positive social values can thus be attached to varieties of speech which from the outside (or even within the group of speakers) are stigmatised.…”

Exploiting the social meanings of urban vernaculars: Differentiating effects of Citélanguage in advertising

“…Although not all youngster consistently make use of Citélanguage, it has become distinctive and recognizable to many. However, it also yields (stereotypical) associations based on personal and mass mediated experiences (Marzo 2015;Svendsen and Marzo 2015). So far, it remains unclear to what extent the use of this variety in advertisements emphasizes (or reduces) social distance between the speaker and the reader and how advertisers may benefit from a perceived similar social identity.…”

“…Consumer responses are contrasted to responses to similar slogans in standard Dutch with a specific focus on the social meanings attributed to Citélanguage. As this urban vernacular has been previously found to elicit both positive and negative language attributions, which stem from the local origins of the language variety (the city of Genk) as well as from the stereotypes that exist about its speakers for their migration backgrounds (Marzo 2015;Koeman et al 2016), we particularly scrutinize the social meanings attributed to Citélanguage. We will question which consumers respond favorably to Citélanguage and how this affects their responses towards advertisements that try to accommodate urban youth?…”