Colloquial Dutch Research Articles

Students’ attitudes towards an instructor’s foreign accent and non-standard language variety

Abstract This study reports the outcomes of a speaker evaluation experiment conducted in a higher educational context in Flanders, in which we investigated the influence of language variety (Standard vs. Colloquial Dutch), accent (Flemish vs. Eastern European) and name (Flemish vs. Eastern European) on students’ perceptions of a female university instructor. The results suggest that participants exhibited a relatively high level of tolerance toward both non-conforming speech and non-conforming speakers. Whereas Colloquial Dutch scored lower than Standard Dutch on standardness, we observed no negative effects of Colloquial Dutch on the teacher’s didactic competence, status, or social attractiveness. We did not find any evidence of a negative bias triggered by an Eastern European name. Whereas the Eastern European accent did have a negative impact on the teacher’s social attractiveness, we did not find any evidence of an accent bias affecting judgements of the teacher’s didactic competence and status.

Translation strategies for rendering interjections from Dutch into Russian in translation of comics

The growing popularity of online communication, where participants increasingly convey their feelings and emotions using minimal characters, has significantly increased the role of interjections in modern language. This research is based on the translation into Russian of the comic book Het Amusement by the Flemish author Brecht Evens (translated by E. Tortsyna). In the comics, the use of interjections, alongside graphic techniques, plays an extremely important role. When rendering interjections, the translator relies primarily on the context. The translation strategy is connected with the search for a word or expression, which will preserve the semantic, stylistic and functional-communicative information contained in the original. The language of the comic book under study demonstrates the features of the southern variant of colloquial Dutch (tussentaal, ‘intermediate language’), first of all, at the level of interjections, which in the southern variant differ from the “northern” ones. The results of the study consist in a systematised review of the ways of rendering Dutch interjections into Russian, with an important role given to the functional-semantic characteristics of these lexical units. Both primary and secondary interjections are of particular interest when studying the problem of interjection translation, as in some cases, the internal form of a secondary interjection in the original does not coincide with the internal form of an interjection chosen by the translator. The omission of an interjection is also an interesting technique, where there is a redistribution of the expressive nuances of an original interjection among elements of the utterance in the translated text.

The influence of ethnicity and language variation on undergraduates' evaluations of Dutch-speaking instructors in Belgium: A contextualized speaker evaluation experiment

This study reports on a contextualized speaker evaluation experiment exploring the effects of language variation (standard vs. colloquial varieties), ethnic identity (Flemish vs. Maghrebi) and wearing a headscarf on students’ evaluation of a female university instructor in Flanders. 314 participants evaluated a single lecture of the instructor on professionalism, comprehensibility, authority, standardness, social attractiveness and physical attractiveness. The results suggest that when measured indirectly, colloquial Dutch is no less acceptable than Standard Dutch in higher education. No general downgrading of the Maghrebi identity was observed. When wearing a headscarf, the standard-speaking Maghrebi instructor was upgraded for professionalism.

Colloquial Dutch 2. by BODEGOM, GERDA, & BRUCE DONALDSON

The article reviews the book Colloquial Dutch 2, with a CD and cassette included, by Gerda Bodegom and Bruce Donaldson, a sequel to the book Colloquial Dutch: The Complete Course for Beginners.

The Talk of the Town: Languages in Amsterdam 1507–2007

This paper is an impressionistic sketch of the language history of Amsterdam in the past five hundred years. To this end we discuss some of the main economic and demographic developments of the city and the political units that it has formed a part of, notably the County of Holland, the Republic of the United Netherlands and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Departing from the past and present dialect situation and processes such as dialect levelling, we also study the language contact effects of migration movements of several types, immigration from abroad and from different regions in the Netherlands. Religious refugees played an important role; this holds for e.g. Brabant Protestants from the Antwerp area around 1585, German religious refugees during the Thirty years War (1618–1648), and Huguenots (i.e. French Protestants) from 1685 onwards. Particular attention is paid to Sephardic (from 1593) and Ashkenazic Jewry (from 1618); especially the Ashkenazim and their main vernacular, Yiddish had an important role as Yiddish was the source for Jewish Dutch. It had long-lasting lexical (on Amsterdam dialects and modern colloquial Dutch) and phonetic effects (on the Amsterdam dialects). More recently, economic considerations played the main role in the immigration, as in the case of the Chinese (as of 1911), Italians, Yugoslavs and the Spaniards (after World War II). Large scale migration from Surinam started in the 1960s. The main groups among the latest arrivals include Turkish migrants (now 5.1% of the Amsterdam population) and Moroccans (8.7%). We end this paper with a brief sketch of a research project which concentrates on the relatively young ethnolects of Dutch spoken by second generation migrants of Turkish and Moroccan descent in Amsterdam as well in the city of Nijmegen (in the southeastern part of the Netherlands).

Colloquial Dutch

Colloquial Dutch

Colloquial Dutch: Holt Spoken Language Series

Colloquial Dutch: Holt Spoken Language Series

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Fraser, W. H. and Squair, J., Elementary French Grammar. Revised by ParkerDaudon, René, French in Review.Guthrie, Ramon and Diller, George E., French Literature and Thought Since the RevolutionFeuillerat, Albert, Baudelaire et sa mère.Tatum, Terrell Louise, Pan American Business Spanish.Spell, Jefferson Rea, Contemporary Spanish‐American FictionCapocelli, Ginevra, L'Italia nel passato a nel presente.Kany, Charles, E. and Osteen, Eleanor Sharpe, Elementary German Conversation.Moulton, William G. and Moulton, Jenni Karding, Spoken German.Bloomfield, Leonard, Colloquial Dutch: Holt Spoken Language Series.Pei, Mario A., Languages for War and Peace, second edition. S. F. Vanni