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Project

Is leuk sufficiently cool? The social meaning of English loanwords: an acquisitional perspective

This project wants to investigate how the speech community of tomorrow, viz. elementary school children evaluate the use of English words in a Dutch context, which contextual parameters affect their evaluation and whether an evolution is visible in the dimensions shaping these attitudes as children grow older. By focusing on these questions, the project I am proposing intents to break new ground in the study of social meaning of English insertions in Dutch. More broadly, these questions locate my project at the crossroads of two emergent research strands in sociolinguistics: (i) the socio-pragmatic turn in anglicism research, (ii) the study of social meaning and variation in language acquisition. 

Three case studies will be conducted, which each offer a different perspective on the research question, and will thus help understand the research topic in a more thorough way. Each case study entails an experiment that uses a different type of attitude measurement. The first case study employs the matched-guise technique (Lambert et al. 1960), a non-automatic indirect method, and also a broadly used explorative technique for the evaluation of language variation and change. The acquisition of prestige will be examined by presenting 540 respondents with a self-created cartoon and an evaluation task. After this initial exploration, the second case study wishes to delve deeper and consolidate the previous results by discarding possible familiarity with the English from CS1 and focusing on individual nonsense words instead. 60 participants will be presented with a forced-choice task, a non-automatic direct method. In doing so, the influence of prestige on naming will be put under scrutiny. The third and final case study consists of an experiment in which the results from the previous studies will be corroborated by employing a different type of attitude measurement, namely an automatic indirect one, the Personalized Implicit Assocation Test (Olson & Fazio 2004). This P-IAT will measure the automatic attitudes towards English loans of 90 participants. 

Date:1 Oct 2017 →  1 Oct 2018
Keywords:language contact, prestige, acquisition
Disciplines:Linguistics, Language studies, Literary studies
Project type:PhD project