oa Expeditie Tussentaal - Leeftijd, identiteit en context in “Expeditie Robinson”

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.