Abstract
Working within the framework of the socio-pragmatic turn in anglicism research, this paper adds a developmental sociolinguistic perspective in investigating preadolescents’ use of English lexical resources in Belgian Dutch. The so far largely undocumented role of English in the linguistic transition from childhood to adolescence is analyzed through a fieldwork corpus of 15,465 utterances, collected during sociolinguistic interviews with 26 (12 boys, 14 girls) Belgian Dutch preadolescent (6–13 years/o) respondents from a local hockey club. All English lexical material in the corpus was identified and categorized following a three-step identification protocol. This protocol introduces a distinction between recognizable unavoidable English (RUE) and recognizable avoidable English (RAE). Results reveal that, overall, 9.7% of the utterances contain recognizable English (RUE + RAE), with RUE being significantly more frequent than RAE. Our findings further indicate only limited stratification according to traditional socio-demographic parameters and display a number of outliers in the respondent profiles. Closer inspection of these outliers allows the conclusion that in the community of practice studied, English is an emerging youth language marker, typically used when talking about gaming or girl-oriented activities. In sum, we conclude that preadolescents in our sample instrumentalize English for incipient identity work, both on the micro-level (being a gamer, a soon-to-be teenage girl) as on the macro-level (through ingroup and outgroup marking).
Highlights
This paper contributes to the ongoing socio-pragmatic shift in anglicism research by tapping into the current attention for the acquisition of variation in sociolinguistics, sometimes referred to as “developmental sociolinguistics”
All analyses are conducted in R, with the utterance level as a point of departure: for each utterance, we indicate whether or not it includes any instances of recognizable avoidable English (RAE) or recognizable unavoidable English (RUE)
In this paper we investigated preadolescents’ developing use of English lexical resources in Belgian Dutch
Summary
This paper contributes to the ongoing socio-pragmatic shift in anglicism research by tapping into the current attention for the acquisition of variation in sociolinguistics, sometimes referred to as “developmental sociolinguistics”. Results are presented from an investigation into the development of English lexical resources in the speech of Belgian Dutch preadolescents. We introduce our protocol to identify and classify English insertions in the corpus. We provide the necessary background on anglicism research and developmental sociolinguistics (1.1), followed by an outline of the Dutch-English contact situation in Flanders (1.2)
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