How do speakers of current Turkish and Moroccan ethnolects of Dutch deal with phonemes that do not exist in their heritage languages and that are at the same time subject to pronounced regional and social variation in the Dutch speech community at large, such as the Dutch diphthong /εi/? This diphthong does not occur in Turkish and Berber and it occurs only as a dialectal allophone in certain dialects of Moroccan Arabic.Data from speakers from the Amsterdam and Nijmegen urban areas are studied. In the Amsterdam dialect, the diphthong is traditionally subject to monophthongization and lowering, yielding realizations as Two variable properties of /εi/ are examined: (1) height of the prominent first element, and (2) the degree of monophthongization. The urban dialect features which had developed into sociolect features over the past generations appear to be undergoing social redistribution to become ethnolect markers.
IntroductionEthnolects are a new domain in the study of language contact and bilingualism, where they have so far mainly been looked at from an ethnographic angle (see Section 2 below). The present contribution focuses on analyzing patterns of linguistic variation from a language centred, sociolinguistic perspective using quantitative tools to analyze patterns of linguistic variation.
_________________________1 This research has benefited greatly from the contributions of current and previous project members. Thanks are also due to Sander van der Harst for various phonetic analyses. The project is financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Meertens Instituut (KNAW) and Radboud University. Thanks are also due to Sander van der Harst for various phonetic analyses, to Shane Walshe for carefully polishing our English, as well as to Astrid van Nahl for her kind and patient assistance throughout the production process.
