Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2009

Can the language of young people in Flanders tell us something about the future look and sound of Dutch in Flanders? To answer that question we start from the results of recent research on the informal language of people between 18 and 24 years old. The recordings used are part of the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (CGN – Corpus of Spoken Dutch). When asked to hold an informal conversation in standard Dutch, most young people in Flanders will not use standard Dutch, but an intermediate variety between dialect and standard Dutch, the so-called tussentaal (literally: language-in-between). In the eyes of the propagators of the official language policy in Flanders this intermediate variety is unacceptable; people should either use dialect or standard Dutch, but not a mixture of both. In the eyes of the young people the tussentaal is no less than their mother tongue, and perfectly fit for all types of supra-regional informal communication. If urged to use standard Dutch, as with the CGN recordings, they will make a few adjustments – lexical, phonological, morpho-syntactical – to their colloquial speech, but they will not switch to the standard code. This behaviour may be very informative when speculating about the status of Dutch in Flanders. However, if we want to know whether standard Dutch still has a future as a spoken language in Flanders, we need to collect more and better data on the linguistic perception and attitudes of the younger generations in Flanders.

In this article, a quantitative corpus-based analysis is presented of the use of Colloquial Belgian Dutch (CBD, better known as tussentaal) in the reality-show “Expeditie Robinson” (the Dutch counterpart of “Survivor”). More specifically, we will use the format of the show and the stratified group of contestants to determine whether a correlation exists between CBD-variation on the one hand and several context- and speaker-related features (e.g. register and age) on the other hand. This will be done by performing a mixed-effect multiple regression analysis on an average CBD-index of the utterances of several Flemish participants. As such, we will show how the use Flemish language users make of CBD depends on the conversational situation, which among others goes in against current presuppositions which claim that Flemish speakers use CBD without any feeling for register. Furthermore, as a more general point, we would like to make clear how reality TV can be useful for sociolinguistic research.

This paper focuses on schwa epenthesis in present-day spontaneously spoken Standard Dutch. Schwa epenthesis is studied in consonant clusters consisting of /r/ followed by a non-dental consonant. We compare the pronunciation of men and women, older and younger speakers, Flemings and Dutchmen originating from several regions in the Dutch language area. Since words with tautosyllabic consonant clusters (e.g. werk ‘work’) showed somewhat more schwa epenthesis than words with heterosyllabic consonant clusters (e.g. werken ‘to work’), both word types were analyzed separately. In contrast to the results of Kloots et al. (2002/2004) the Flemish speakers produced more schwas than the Dutch ones. The older generation used more schwas than the younger generation. This tendency was particularly strong within the group of female speakers. Moreover, our study revealed that schwa epenthesis is much more likely when /r/ is pronounced as a trill or fricative, although a non-vocalic pronunciation of /r/ does not lead to schwa insertion automatically.

Semiotaxis van C.L. Ebeling (2006) werd in Nederlandse Taalkunde al besproken door A.M. Duinhoven (2007), die vooral inging op de theoretische uitgangspunten van Ebeling en het door hem gebruikte notatiesysteem. Vanwege de beperkte omvang van een boekbespreking kon Duinhoven slechts een paar van de vele onderwerpen die Ebeling aan de orde stelt, in meer detail behandelen. Gezien de veelzijdige inhoud van Semiotaxis, bleef er dan ook voldoende ruimte om in de rubriek Discussie nogmaals aandacht te vragen voor dit werk. Een aantal auteurs werd gevraagd te reageren op Ebelings analyse van een specifiek probleem uit de Nederlandse grammatica. De gekozen onderwerpen waren uiteindelijk de volgende: het lidwoord en lidwoordloosheid (Ina Schermer), de betekenis(sen) van het voltooid deelwoord (Els Elffers), de valentiestructuur van werkwoorden (Timothy Colleman) en grammaticaal geslacht/genus (Andries van Helden); Henk Verkuyl las op ons verzoek Semiotaxis met de bril van een logisch-semanticus. De vorm van deze rubriek gaf ons bovendien de mogelijkheid om in een afsluitende bijdrage Ebeling zelf op zijn critici te laten reageren. In deze inleiding schetsen we eerst de historische en theoretische achtergronden van Semiotaxis en vatten we de bijdragen aan de Discussie kort samen.

De rubriek Uit de tijdschriften geeft kort weer wat er in andere tijdschriften op het gebied van de taalkunde is verschenen. Momenteel worden in deze rubriek de volgende tijdschriften besproken: Anéla, Internationale Neerlandistiek, Naamkunde, Ons Erfdeel, Onze Taal, Over Taal, Taal en Tongval. Uitgevers van niet vermelde taalkundige periodieken die hun tijdschrift besproken willen zien, wordt verzocht contact op te nemen met de redacteur van deze rubriek: Dr. J. Nijen Twilhaar Oerdijk 35 7433 AG Schalkhaar tel.: 0570-608080 e-mail: [email protected]