Search

This paper outlines a regional and socio-demographic overview of languages and dialects used most often in and outside the home and on social media in the Netherlands based on a large-scale national representative survey by Statistics Netherlands conducted in 2019 among 7,652 people aged 15 years or older. 149 different languages/dialects were reported to be spoken at home, in other places or used for writing messages on social media. For 25 percent of the people surveyed, Dutch is not dominating at home: 8.2 percent speak another language than Dutch; 10.2 percent a regional language (Low Saxon 4.8 percent; Limburgish 3.4 percent, and Frisian 2.0 percent), and 5.3 percent dialect. The five most widely spoken other languages are English (1.6 percent), Turkish (0.9 percent), Moroccan Arabic/Berber (0.8 percent), Chinese/Mandarin (0.4 percent) and Polish (0.4 percent). 83 percent mostly use Dutch to write messages on social media with English following (35 percent). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introductory paper we discuss the expanding focus of lexical borrowing research over the past decade. Where this 'inevitable' outcome of language contact was originally predominantly addressed from a historical linguistic and lexicographic perspective, a broader range of linguistic traditions have recently been applied to the topic, each introducing their own questions, perspectives and methods. Below, we first present the main insights ensuing from a century of loanword research. Then, we introduce the viewpoints that characterize more recent work and the questions they foreground. In presenting the contributions to this special issue, we finally pay specific attention to the way the six papers add to the broader tendencies and innovations of current lexical borrowing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory paper outlines the different trends and movements that have in recent years led to a marked increase in the number of linguistic studies that combine a construction-based theoretical outlook on grammar with a dedicated interest in issues of synchronic and/or diachronic language variation. In addition, it gives an overview of the papers included in this thematic issue and links them with broader tendencies in the fields of cognitive linguistics and construction grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the reported attitudes of Flemish Sign Language (or VGT) signers with respect to Standard(ised) VGT and (varieties of) VGT in the media. Information extracted from interviews with and stimulus fragments shown to ten deaf VGT signers shows that they no longer consider standardization of VGT negatively. However, they do not value standard versus nonstandard varieties in terms of status versus solidarity traits (Giles & Coupland, 1991), but rather in terms of intelligibility versus identity. With respect to VGT on national television the quality of signing is considered more important than the variety used. Nevertheless, they do realize that the use of VGT in the media can have a significant impact on normativity and standardization of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the results of a perception study in Flanders are reported. 80 informants were subjected to a qualitative interview, to gain insight in the way Flemish language users judge on the situational appropriacy of several Dutch language varieties. The reported beliefs of the informants were compared to language ideological frameworks and they show an evolution in the standard language ideology (Milroy & Milroy, 1985), an ideology in which the standard language is considered to be the ideal and to be the only appropriate variety for formal and public situations. The informants still consider the standard language to be important and to be superior, but the variety according to them is not necessary for formal and public situations. Instead Tussentaal, lit. 'in-between language', has gained a position in the situational spectre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch aan-construction (e.g. Hij gaf een bos bloemen aan zijn vrouw 'He gave a bouquet to his wife'), the prepositional alternative for the double object construction (Hij gaf zijn vrouw een bos bloemen 'He gave his wife a bouquet'), is a post Middle Dutch innovation (i.e. after 1500 AD). The precise details of the rise of the aan-construction remain, however, understudied. It is for example unclear whether the construction really breaks through in the 17th century, as Weijnen and Gordijn (1970) argue on the basis of a small corpus of farces, and what its semantic range was in those early days. In this paper we try to shed more light on these issues. On the basis of a selfcompiled corpus of literary Dutch, we firstly show that the construction was not only already frequently attested in the language use in the 17th century, but also covered a remarkably wide semantic range at that time. Next, via a detailed comparison with data for the 20th century, we show that there have been interesting changes concerning the semantic evolution of the aanconstruction. The structural weight of a cluster of 'do'- and 'send'-verbs for example declines over time and at more general level there seems to be a trend towards more abstract uses of the aan-construction. A diachronic collostructional analysis (Hilpert, 2006) and Configural Frequency Analysis (von Eye, 2002) lends a statistical underpinning to our observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a corpus-based investigation into naming preferences in Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch for fourteen clothing terms. The study is a follow-up of Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999), in which soccer and clothing terminology from 1950, 1970 and 1990 was analysed as an indicator of standardisation in Dutch. This study extends the clothing corpus with new, comparable data from 2012 collected from magazines and shop windows. A profile-based measure of linguistic uniformity quantifies the differences in naming preferences across the 14 concepts between different varieties of Dutch. The results shed new light on the current linguistic situation in the Low Countries. The diachronic convergence between Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch found in Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999) seems to have come to a halt in present-day Dutch. On the other hand, the recent data confirm that the distance between the language in the lower register shop windows and the standard language in magazines remains largest in Belgian Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the results of a perception study in Flanders are reported. 80 informants were subjected to a qualitative interview, to gain insight in the way Flemish language users judge on the situational appropriacy of several Dutch language varieties. The reported beliefs of the informants were compared to language ideological frameworks and they show an evolution in the standard language ideology (Milroy & Milroy, 1985), an ideology in which the standard language is considered to be the ideal and to be the only appropriate variety for formal and public situations. The informants still consider the standard language to be important and to be superior, but the variety according to them is not necessary for formal and public situations. Instead Tussentaal, lit. 'in-between language', has gained a position in the situational spectre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]