Guest Lecture in the discussion group on language shift

Organised by Miriam Neuhausen & Maike Rocker

via Zoom:  https://uni-freiburg.zoom.us/j/64989765556?pwd=eXBJYkd0c0dqRzZaRVJ5K0xXdkNQZz09

Heritage linguistics meets historical sociolinguistics: a project on early Flemish emigrants

Abstract

In this presentation, I will discuss the preliminary results of two case studies that are part of my PhD project, which investigates the influence of English on Heritage Belgian Dutch. The first case study focuses on language ideologies and language attitudes present in Flemish-American heritage press printed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By means of content analysis, I looked for implicit and explicit metalinguistic comments regarding English and Flemish. The goal of this case study was to find out more about how the early Flemish emigrants positioned themselves toward the two languages. Did they want to learn English? Were they set on preserving Flemish as a community language?

The second case study tackles the actual language use in Flemish-American heritage press. Two research questions were put forward: ‘How much English did the Flemish emigrants borrow?’ and ‘What did the English transfers in Heritage Belgian Dutch look like?’ As such, I examined the borrowing rate and borrowing type, the latter based on Haugen’s (1950) taxonomy, while also accounting for the influence of part of speech, semantic domain, level of integration, and word length.