The (near) absence of English in Flemish dinner table conversations

Abstract

This paper studies the low frequency of English insertions in child-directed speech in eight Flemish families, which is striking considering the strong position of English in other domains in Flanders. Crossing usage-based approaches to language acquisition and language socialization research, we scrutinize our corpus of dinner table conversations that consist of over 25,000 utterances, complemented by sociolinguistic interviews with the caregivers of each family. After mining our corpus for English insertions, we present a quantitative exploration that reveals how less than 1% of the utterances per family contain English insertions. Assessing whether this result can be interpreted as parents’ attempts to socialize their children towards Dutch, and what this reveals about their language regards, we analyze selected fragments through multimodal discourse analysis. After discussing possible implications of these findings for the position of English in Flanders, we additionally discuss them against the theoretical background of developmental sociolinguistics, and against the methodological background of working with small samples and negative evidence in a usage-based approach (see e.g. negative entrenchment.

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

“…In their analysis of more than 200,000 MSN chat messages, they identified at least one English insertion in 13.3% of the posts. Interestingly, markedly different results are found in Zenner and Van De Mieroop (2021)'s study on parent-child interactions involving dinner table conversations between 16 parents and 18 children aged 1 to 7, complemented by sociolinguistic interviews with the parents. Here, less than 1% of the utterances contain minimally one English word and parents, furthermore, report to have no socialization aim towards English.…”

“…Following the aforementioned work of Zenner and Van De Mieroop (2021) involving preschoolers in parent-child interactions (less than 1% of English) and De Decker and Vandekerckhove (2012) targeting adolescents (13.3% of English), we hypothesize to find an intermediary frequency, situated in between those two percentages, for the preadolescent age group. As previous studies have shown varying results for different types of English, we insist on categorizing the English elements found in terms of e.g.…”

Starman or Sterrenman: An acquisitional perspective on the social meaning of English in Flanders

“…Peters (2018) shows that at least in secondary school high levels of English proficiency are linked to children's exposure to English lexemes and phrases in various genres and domains, primarily mass and social media. Overall, although Flemish children cannot be classified as proper bilingual speakers (in the sense that most of them are not able to hold a conversation in English) and are not per se socialized towards using English by their primary caregivers (see Zenner & Van De Mieroop, 2019), it seems safe to say that they are in contact with the English language prior to formal tuition in the schooling context, which also impacts their second language (L2) acquisition process.…”

“…We anticipate that the dynamism dimension, which was already included in Zahn and Hopper's (1985) seminal work, will be particularly relevant in our study, as the use of English insertions in Dutch has been linked with dynamic social attributes such as modernity, youth and globalization (see earlier, 'English-Dutch contact in acquisition'). At the same time, we might anticipate children to award higher solidarity scores to the Dutch hero, given the 'homeliness' of Dutch (Zenner & Van De Mieroop, 2019). To this end, traditional questions from the 'adult' matched guise surveys were altered to fit children's social context (see Miller (2017, p. 108) pointing out issues with young children's understanding of the adult evaluation scales).…”

“…Belgian Dutch is one of the three official national languages of Belgium, alongside French (spoken in Brussels and Wallonia, the southern part of the country) and German, used in a small area in the east of the country. The strong territoriality-driven language legislation and the country's long-lasting "language battles" are reflected in the largely monolingual family language policies (see Zenner & Van De Mieroop 2019), with Dutch-speaking families in the North (Flanders) and French-speaking families in the South (Wallonia) 1 . At the same time, contact with English is visible in nearly all domains of life, where it is shown to be linked amongst others with modernity, fun and youth (Gerritsen et al 2007 Schooling in Flanders forms an exception to this high openness towards English in the sense that French, rather than English, is the second language offered in the Flemish education system, with tuition typically starting in the fifth year of primary school, for children aged ten.…”