English from Scratch: Preadolescents’ Developing Use of English Lexical Resources in Belgian Dutch

Abstract

Working within the framework of the socio-pragmatic turn in anglicism research, this paper adds a developmental sociolinguistic perspective in investigating preadolescents’ use of English lexical resources in Belgian Dutch. The so far largely undocumented role of English in the linguistic transition from childhood to adolescence is analyzed through a fieldwork corpus of 15,465 utterances, collected during sociolinguistic interviews with 26 (12 boys, 14 girls) Belgian Dutch preadolescent (6–13 years/o) respondents from a local hockey club. All English lexical material in the corpus was identified and categorized following a three-step identification protocol. This protocol introduces a distinction between recognizable unavoidable English (RUE) and recognizable avoidable English (RAE). Results reveal that, overall, 9.7% of the utterances contain recognizable English (RUE + RAE), with RUE being significantly more frequent than RAE. Our findings further indicate only limited stratification according to traditional socio-demographic parameters and display a number of outliers in the respondent profiles. Closer inspection of these outliers allows the conclusion that in the community of practice studied, English is an emerging youth language marker, typically used when talking about gaming or girl-oriented activities. In sum, we conclude that preadolescents in our sample instrumentalize English for incipient identity work, both on the micro-level (being a gamer, a soon-to-be teenage girl) as on the macro-level (through ingroup and outgroup marking).

Says who? Language regard towards speaker groups using English loanwords in Dutch

“…Relying instead on discourse analyses, Zenner and Van De Mieroop (2021) describe the near absence of English in family dinner-table conversations, and Zenner and Van De Mieroop (2017) indicate how English loanwords are used to index specific ingroup/outgroup boundaries in one season of the reality TV show Expeditie Robinson (known as Survivor in other countries). Starting from a mixed-method approach, then, Schuring and Zenner (2022) focus on preadolescents' use of English insertions in Belgian Dutch for which they found an intermediary frequency of usage, situated in between previously reported English use of preschoolers and adolescents; and influenced by a topic and identity effect related to both gaming and stereotypically girl-oriented activities. Furthermore, business communication specialists have revealed the special position of English in marketing research, showing the strong foothold of English loans in both product (Gerritsen et al 2007) and job (van Meurs 2010) advertising.…”

“…This growing body of research allows us to pinpoint a number of social categories and domains that can be linked up with the use of English loanwords. First, in terms of macro-social characteristics, previous work predominantly points to age as a relevant factor, with research on production (De Decker and Vandekerckhove 2013;Schuring and Zenner 2022;Verheijen and Van Hout 2022;Zenner et al, this issue), reported use (Crombez et al 2022) and evaluation , linking the use of English to (pre)adolescents and young professionals. Second, research shows that certain societal hotspots can be identified for the use of English in Dutch, including the domains of marketing, media and fields such as sports ( van Iperen [1980], and specifically soccer, cf.…”