Abstract
AbstractOur research on variation in the expression of grammatical gender (in determiners and adnominal inflection) in present-day ethnolectal Dutch is based on interactional speech data collected among 10–12 and 18–20-year-old male adolescents with Turkish, Moroccan and non-immigrant Dutch backgrounds, born and raised in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam or Nijmegen. The cities, which both have multicultural demographic profiles, are located in different dialect areas. In the data, the realization of neuter gender appears to vary greatly; in our analyses of this variation linguistic and social parameters were included. With regard to the language-internal conditioning, grammatical and semantic dimensions have been taken into account. Apart from the speakers’ age and city of residence, the social dimensions also include background of both the speaker and the interlocutor. The outcomes shed light on three aspects. As regards conditioning factors, L1 substrates, processes of L2 acquisition of the first generations of migrants, and surrounding regional variation all play a role. As regards the place of ethnolectal variation in the speakers’ verbal repertoires, we found evidence for a stylistic role of variable gender assignment in determiners. Our data do not support the hypothesis of the cross-over of ethnolectal changes in Dutch grammatical gender marking to speakers without an immigrant background.
Highlights
As cities in industrialized societies become ethnically more complex due to labor migration, the range of varieties in the national languages spoken there increases, and ethnolectal varieties are added to the urban social dialect landscape
Our research on variation in the expression of grammatical gender in present-day ethnolectal Dutch is based on interactional speech data collected among 10–12 and 18–20-year-old male adolescents with Turkish, Moroccan and non-immigrant Dutch backgrounds, born and raised in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam or Nijmegen
Our data do not support the hypothesis of the cross-over of ethnolectal changes in Dutch grammatical gender marking to speakers without an immigrant background
Summary
As cities in industrialized societies become ethnically more complex due to labor migration, the range of varieties in the national languages spoken there increases, and ethnolectal varieties are added to the urban social dialect landscape. Ethnolectal varieties emerge in multilingual contexts and are often rooted in processes of second language acquisition. The same holds for the use of the common gender demonstratives deze ‘this’/die ‘that’ instead of the neuter equivalents dit/dat:. (5) tegenwoordig komt de krant altijd met eh met negatieve nieuws [negatief] ‘these days the newspaper always comes with eh negative news’ (Erhan, 5:29) To help understand these cases, this article first sketches the expression of grammatical gender in Standard Dutch in contrast with Dutch dialects, Turkish, Moroccan Arabic and Berber (Section 2), and surveys earlier studies on variation in the expression of grammatical gender in ethnic varieties of Dutch (Section 3).
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