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Project

English as a stylistic resource in the Belgian Dutch of pre- and young adolescents: attitudes and beliefs

Style, meaning “a way of doing something”, is key to understanding action and interaction through language (Coupland, 2007). Whether it is studied with a focus on structure or a focus on processes, language contact is of central importance in inquiry into style in language. A focus on structure foregrounds the impact of contact on linguistic structure and language change (Thomason, 2001; Myers-Scotton, 2002), language attitudes (Kristiansen, 2009) and style as a component of sociolinguistic variation (Eckert, 2019). Corpora and experimental surveys are two of the main methods used in studies focusing on linguistic structure. For a focus on processes, language contact is viewed as the linguistic resources and repertoires available to individual speakers and communities (Gumperz, 1972; Blommaert, 2010) and the concepts of speaker agency (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005), social practice (Bourdieu, 1978) and language ideology (Irvine, 2009) are central. Studies focusing on style (or styling) as a process often privilege the local context through the use of ethnographic methods. The central concerns of these two viewpoints are reflected in the usage-based theory (Ibbotston, 2013; Backus, 2020), which holds that the structure of language reflects what it is used for. As both a societal group with an outsized influence on language change (Holmes-Elliott, 2016) and a crucial life stage for seeking and negotiating one’s individual and joint place in the social world (Eckert, 2003; Swanenberg; 2019), adolescence makes a fitting case study for investigating the social processes of language. Adolescents in western Europe today live in a relatively new and superdiverse social environment (Blommaert & Backus, 2013) in which English-language elements are pervasively present, creating fertile ground for enquiry into style in language. This project combines corpus, experimental and ethnographic methods to investigate a specific “way of speaking” (Hymes, 1972), namely the use of English elements in Belgian Dutch by adolescents, through the lens of languages users’ beliefs and attitudes towards the use of that linguistic style.

Date:25 Nov 2019 →  25 Nov 2023
Keywords:developmental sociolinguistics, social meaning, language attitudes
Disciplines:Sociolinguistics, Developmental linguistics, Contact linguistics
Project type:PhD project