Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
How crazy is the amount of English in children’s Dutch really? A multi-methods analysis of a youth language phenomenon
- Date
- Monday 3 February 2025
- Time
- Series
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.03
Abstract
In the current globalized society, English is pervasive in all domains of life, infusing the lexicon of a variety of languages (e.g. Dutch) and specific language users (e.g. children). This talk focuses on the amount of English lexemes in the speech of children in Flanders. In particular, it will elaborate on the way Dutch-speaking children develop the social meaning of English lexical items. The talk will consist of two parts.
In a first part, I will elaborate on English as a domain-specific hotspot through the results of three studies on English use in children’s roleplay. Specifically, the results report on the extent to which children are able to adjust their speech in a roleplay setting (e.g. inserting more English items for rapper as opposed to farmer). A second part, then, will center on English as a youth language marker, highlighting two studies on children’s use of English in spontaneous speech. In this respect, both genre sensitivity (youth language context vs. non-youth language context) and age-related variation (preadolescents vs. adolescents) are foregrounded. Highlighting the perspective of the young language user, this research combines the fields of anglicism research and developmental sociolinguistics to get a better understanding of how the social meaning of English is developed in (pre)adolescence.