Exploring past and present layers of multilingualism in Flemish-emigrant writing

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the study of Belgian Dutch as an immigrant language in North America. It does so with the specific hypothesis that the pre-migration sociolinguistic and language political context in migrants’ home countries plays an important role, in particular with regard to societal multilingualism, as underlying layers of multilingualism can have an impact on the post-migration contact situation. Using the diary of a Flemish missionary who moved to Canada in 1886 as our main source, both Dutch-French and Dutch-English language contact are charted over a 25-year time span, with specific attention to lexical borrowing. We discuss the impact of a number of mostly language-internal variables on the relative frequency of lexical borrowing from each source language (e.g., semantic field, part of speech, level of integration in the target language, luxury versus necessary loans), revealing highly divergent borrowing profiles for French and English. The article rounds off by assessing the explanatory value of the pre-migration sociolinguistic context of Belgian Dutch, for the language patterns observed in this specific ego-document, discussing the interaction between past and present layers of language contact.