De integratie van Engels in Vlaamse jongerentaal kwantitatief en kwalitatief bekeken: das wel nice! :p

Abstract

The paper focuses on the presence of English in a written chat corpus produced by Flemish adolescents in their late teens whose native language is (a variety of) Dutch. Topics include the relative presence of lexemes and word categories, the effect on the target language (Dutch) and the way the loans are integrated into the chatspeak of the teenagers, i.e. (g)localisation processes. In quantitative terms, the impact of English on the informal ‘speech’ of Flemish teenagers appears to be considerable, but the borrowing process is not a ‘copy-and-paste’ practice. In many cases the teenagers transform the English words graphematically, morphologically and/or semantically. By using an extensive and reliable corpus and by quantifying and categorizing the English tokens in several ways, this paper offers a representative case study for the appropriation of English by a generation whose socialization process partly proceeds via electronic media.