The sociopragmatic parameters steering the reported selection of Anglicisms or their Dutch alternatives

Abstract

Researchers studying language variation and change induced by contact with English initially focused on the linguistic integration of English source language (SL) material in the morphophonological structure of the receptor language (RL). Shifting the attention toward the sociopragmatic localization of English lexical material, researchers now foreground both the social identity work conducted with English material and the pragmatic functions of English lexemes and heritage alternatives. So far, however, most of these studies rely on production data, paying less attention to language users’ perception and evaluation of English lexemes. Therefore, integrating insights from language production and evaluation, this study asks the questions (i) which lexical preference speakers express when asked to choose between an English and a heritage form; and (ii) which sociopragmatic parameters help to explain this preference. To answer these questions, a forced-choice experiment was conducted in which over 1,500 Dutch-speaking participants were asked to select their preferred expression when provided with a loanword and a heritage alternative. Each participant was offered 12 target trials and 10 filler trials. The target trials, drawn from a corpus-based study, include a balanced set of loans from three semantic fields with various frequencies in usage data. Pragmatic variation was included by randomly presenting the trials in speech contexts of communicative immediacy and communicative distance. Mixed-effects logistic regression analyses show a significant impact of community-based usage statistics, the age and self-reported attitude of the participant, as well as the speech context in which the concepts were offered.