Is Moroccan-flavoured Standard Dutch standard or not? On the use of perceptual criteria to determine the limits of standard languages

Measuring language attitudes using the Personalized Implicit Association Test: A case study on regional varieties of Dutch in Belgium

“…In this paper we report on a study that uses the Personalized Implicit Association Test (P-IAT, Olson & Fazio, 2004) to measure attitudes towards regional language variation in Belgian Dutch. The study aligns with a recent wave of methodological innovation in the field of language attitude research, as well as with a renewed interest in attitudes towards (regional) language variation in the Dutch language area (i.e., Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, and the Netherlands) (e.g., Grondelaers, Van Hout & Speelman, 2011; Speelman, Spruyt, Impe & Geeraerts, 2013; Preston, 2016). In that respect, the objectives of the study are twofold: both methodological and descriptive.…”

“…For instance, certain studies found (some) influence of listeners’ age (Vandekerckhove & Cuvelier, 2007; Ghyselen, 2009), while others did not (Impe & Speelman, 2007, who did not find any gender differences either). Impe & Speelman (2007) and Grondelaers et al (2011) also report no influence of listeners’ regional background, while this does seem to be the case in Speelman et al (2013). It has also been shown that the regional origin of the CBD variety influences perceptions: in Impe & Speelman (2007), the Brabant variety of CBD receives the most positive evaluations on the solidarity dimension.…”

“…Yet, some studies report findings that nuance this picture and present some neutral (Lybaert, 2014), less negative (Cuvelier, 2007; Grondelaers & Speelman, 2013) or inconsistent (albeit rather low, Vandekerckhove & Cuvelier, 2007) perceptions of CBD on the level of competence and status. Grondelaers et al (2011), who did not include a comparison with SBD in their study, even report a certain level of speaker prestige and accent status for CBD, especially for the central Brabant variety in comparison to more peripheral varieties. The influence of sociodemographic variables on these attitudes towards SBD and CBD is still unclear.…”

“…The choice of specific regional varieties, Antwerp as the central variety and West-Flemish as the peripheral variety, was based on Speelman et al (2013) in order to be able to compare results. Choosing a central and a peripheral variety is also interesting from a theoretical point of view: CBD features from the central area are claimed to spread to the peripheral area, and, as indicated above, perceptual research found some evidence that central varieties may be more positively evaluated than peripheral ones (Impe & Speelman, 2007; Grondelaers et al, 2011).…”

“…This colloquial variety, which we will refer to in this paper as Colloquial Belgian Dutch (CBD), has proven hard to define and delineate and is to be situated somewhere between the local dialects and Standard Belgian Dutch. This explains why the variety is commonly nicknamed tussentaal , which literally translates as ‘in-between language’ (Grondelaers et al, 2011). CBD can be described as ‘a collection of linguistic variables that have a supra-regional distribution on the geographic dimension’ (Geeraerts & Van de Velde, 2013: 532).…”