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Project
From the promised land: a historical sociolinguistic study of the influence of English on the language use of Flemish emigrants (FWOTM1062)
Haugen’s (1953) pivotal study initiated a series of analyses of
heritage languages in North America. While the dynamics between
English and many Western languages have indeed already been
abundantly studied, research on Heritage Belgian Dutch remains
uncovered ground to a very large extent. Nevertheless, Belgian
Dutch forms an interesting case study because of its rather unique
sociolinguistic history.
As such, this project proposes an in-depth study tackling the
language use of Flemish emigrants in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th
century on three levels. Societal aspects of language contact are
foregrounded in a metalinguistic study on the discourse surrounding
English in American-Flemish newspapers. Next, I look at language
contact and the individual by investigating the influence of social
factors on the borrowing rate and borrowing type. To this end, I will
use a corpus of ego-documents and a newspaper corpus. This allows
me to take into account the impact of a pragmatic factor, i.e.
discourse genre. Finally, three case studies are conducted examining
lexicon and word formation, semantic-pragmatic influence, and
inflectional morphology to give an indication of the linguistic aspects
of language contact. In addition to analyzing a hitherto overlooked
chapter in the Dutch language contact history, the proposed study
will also contribute to our understanding of the role of the premigration sociolinguistic context, by paying explicit attention to the
Belgian language history.
heritage languages in North America. While the dynamics between
English and many Western languages have indeed already been
abundantly studied, research on Heritage Belgian Dutch remains
uncovered ground to a very large extent. Nevertheless, Belgian
Dutch forms an interesting case study because of its rather unique
sociolinguistic history.
As such, this project proposes an in-depth study tackling the
language use of Flemish emigrants in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th
century on three levels. Societal aspects of language contact are
foregrounded in a metalinguistic study on the discourse surrounding
English in American-Flemish newspapers. Next, I look at language
contact and the individual by investigating the influence of social
factors on the borrowing rate and borrowing type. To this end, I will
use a corpus of ego-documents and a newspaper corpus. This allows
me to take into account the impact of a pragmatic factor, i.e.
discourse genre. Finally, three case studies are conducted examining
lexicon and word formation, semantic-pragmatic influence, and
inflectional morphology to give an indication of the linguistic aspects
of language contact. In addition to analyzing a hitherto overlooked
chapter in the Dutch language contact history, the proposed study
will also contribute to our understanding of the role of the premigration sociolinguistic context, by paying explicit attention to the
Belgian language history.
Date:1 Nov 2021 → Today
Keywords:migration, historical sociolinguistics of Dutch, heritage language linguistics
Disciplines:Dutch language, Contact linguistics, Corpus linguistics, Historical linguistics, Sociolinguistics