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- Volume 75, Issue 2, 2023
Taal en Tongval - Volume 75, Issue 2, 2023
Volume 75, Issue 2, 2023
- Artikelen
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Of versus als ter inleiding van afhankelijke ja/nee-vragen in het Surinaams-Nederlands: een kwantitatieve verkenning
Door Anne-Sophie GhyselenAbstractEven though Dutch has been the official language of government and education in Suriname since 1876 and about 50% of the Surinamese households reports speaking Dutch at home, defining or delineating Surinamese Dutch remains highly problematic. ‘Typical’ Surinamese Dutch lexical, phonetic, morphological and syntactic features have been identified, but it is unclear to what degree these features are used (cf. de Kleine 2013, 855), by whom, how they correlate with social, stylistic and other parameters and whether they are accepted as standard Dutch by the Surinamese. The present study addresses this lacuna by quantitatively analyzing a feature often considered to be typical of Surinamese Dutch: the use of the subordinating conjunction als in dependent yes/no-clauses (e.g. Ik weet niet als hij komt, ‘I don’t know whether he’s coming’). While in Netherlandic and Belgian Standard Dutch the conjunction of is expected, the conjunction als is said to be typical of Surinamese Dutch. An analysis of the distribution of als in two corpora – a new corpus of spoken Surinamese Dutch and the Surinamese component of the Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands – however indicates that the subordinator of is actually dominant in Suriname: in the written corpus, with mainly texts of linguistic professionals, als is attested in only 7% of 7722 relevant clauses, whereas in the spoken corpus – which contains the speech of 22 highly educated Creole women – its frequency is higher, viz. 44% (n=161). Machine learning based multivariate analyses show that the variation between als and of is mostly individually determined. In the spoken dataset, the individual speaker emerges as overpowering predictor, and interestingly, the interspeaker variation is difficult to explain in terms of the speakers’ language backgrounds or age. Linguistic variables such as the matrix verb, the polarity of the sentence and the frequency of the matrix verb have little predictive power. In the written dataset, the interauthor variation could not be estimated due to methodological issues, but here too, the studied linguistic variables have hardly any explanatory power. In the discussion, it is argued that the considerable individual variation might be a sign of endoglossic standardization, whereby the conjunction als is establishing itself slowly as part of the Surinamese Dutch standard norm.
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Vormen en Functies van Meertaligheid in Oude Liederen uit de Lage Landen
Door Jacomine NortierAbstractMultilingualism can fulfil several functions, in both oral and written texts. Sometimes it is used when knowledge in one of the languages is insufficient, or in order to quote someone speaking another language. It may, for example, also be used to mark a certain identity or a conversational turn.
This article shows how multilingualism in old songs is used with the same intentions as in modern multilingual contexts. Multilingualism in religious and secular old songs is discussed and illustrated with examples. Two secular songs are analyzed in more detail. Sometimes, the rules that usually are followed in codeswitching seem to be violated deliberately in these songs, in order to accomplish certain effects, such as the expression of drunkenness, passion or great sorrow. The term translanguaging, used in modern sociolinguistics, seems to cover phenomena in the way songs have been written down centuries ago, too.
The data consists of multilingual songs in which one of the languages is Dutch.
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‘Zijt gij dat of bent gij dat?’
Door Anthe SevenantsAbstractIn Colloquial Belgian Dutch (CBD) gij bent, a special form of the second person singular of zijn (‘to be’), has appeared, which blends the historically traditional form gij zijt with Standard Dutch bent from jij bent. A logistic regression analysis and general additive model of CBD tweets show that gij bent is popular only in the Brabant dialect area and that usage is highest in the northern Antwerp area. Gij bent is also more likely to appear in tweets with general statements rather than conversations, which hints at a formality difference. Tweets thought to come from women also feature more gij bent. It is plausible that gij bent was able to spread throughout the Brabant dialect area because of a formality reinterpretation. While the form likely originates from the northern Antwerp dialects, it might have been reinterpreted as an innovative, hybrid form in CBD, but only in the Brabant area.
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