Two Twitter-based corpus studies are reported to account for the increasing preference in The Netherlands for the stigmatized subject use of the object pronoun hun ‘them.’ Twitter data were collected to obtain a sufficient number of hun-tokens, but also to investigate the validity of two hypotheses on the preference for hun, this is, that subject-hun is a contrast profiler which thrives in contexts of evaluation and qualification, and that subject-hun is propelled by its dynamic social meaning, being a tool for nonposh and streetwise self-stylization. Although the latter is not normally a predictor included in regression analyses of constructional choice, it turns out that expressively spruced up tweets with vivid contrast profiling are the prime biotope of subject-hun. Along the way, this paper reviews the potential of Twitter data for the reconciliation of macro-big-data analysis with micro-sociolinguistic focus, but it also reports and attempts to remedy three concerns.

We investigated age-related decline in adult learning of Dutch as an additional language (Ln) in speaking, writing, listening, and reading proficiency test scores for 56,024 adult immigrants with 50 L1s who came to the Netherlands for study or work. Performance for all four language skills turned out to decline monotonically after an age of arrival of about 25 years, similar to developmental trajectories observed in earlier aging research on additional language learning and in aging research on cognitive abilities. Also, linguistic dissimilarity increased age-related decline across all four language skills, but speaking in particular. We measured linguistic dissimilarity between first languages (L1s = 50) and Dutch (Ln) for morphology, vocabulary, and phonology. Our conclusion is that the L1 language background influences the effects of age-related decline in adult language learning, and that the constraints involved reflect both biological (language learning ability) and experience-based (acquired L1 proficiency) cognitive resources.

The present approach estimates the strength of intensifiers in Dutch by computing their information values in a language corpus, that is, contextual information content (Cohen Priva, 2008; Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2011) and Shannon Information (Shannon & Weaver, 1948), to respectively explain the use value and the expressive value of intensifiers when they intensify a predicative adjective. Conflicting strength values help in understanding the high number of intensifiers commonly available in particular languages and the constant need for adding new ones. Our approach underlines the relevance of two measures of information content (IC) for ranking intensifiers: (i) IC in context: the more combinatorial or transitional options an intensifier has, the higher its contextual information content and consequently its use value; and (ii) IC in relation to all alternative intensifiers: the higher the surprisal value that the occurrence of an intensifier evokes, the higher its expressive value. We shall investigate the validity of these two measures by researching a large corpus of Dutch tweets and shall test whether the values of these two measures can predict the stacking order in sequences of intensifiers.

The use of loanwords is generally attributed to a social feature, like social prestige, and to semantic features, like the need to fill a lexical gap. However, few studies take into account variation in the use of loanwords within a speech community, and directly compare the frequency of loanwords from more than one source language. This paper contributes to research on lexical borrowing by comparing the distribution of loanwords from three different source languages in two large databases of dialect data. We take an onomasiological perspective, which allows us to gauge the frequency of borrowed lexical items vis-à-vis alternative expressions. Using Generalized Additive Mixed Modeling, we show that the usage of loanwords can only be explained by taking into account the interaction between semantics and geographical diffusion. Our analysis confirms that the patterns that occur almost exclusively reflect changes in socio-cultural history.

Mouthings, the spoken language elements in sign language discourse, are typically analysed as having a redundant, one-on-one relationship with manual signs, both semantically and temporally. We explore exceptions to this presupposed semantic and temporal congruency in a corpus of spontaneous signed conversation by deaf users of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). We identify specifying mouthings (words with a different meaning than the co-occurring sign), solo mouthings (uttered while the hands are inactive) and added mouthings (words added to a signing stream without their corresponding sign), and make a sentence-level analysis of their occurrences. These non-redundant mouthings occurred in 12% of all utterances, and were made by almost all signers. We argue for the presence of a code-blending continuum for NGT, where NGT is the matrix language and spoken Dutch is blended in, in various degrees. We suggest expansion of existing code-mixing models, to allow for description of bimodal mixing.

There is ample evidence that native and non-native listeners use lexical knowledge to retune their native phonetic categories following ambiguous pronunciations. The present study investigates whether a non-native ambiguous sound can retune non-native phonetic categories. After a brief exposure to an ambiguous British English [l/ɹ] sound, Dutch listeners demonstrated retuning. This retuning was, however, asymmetrical: the non-native listeners seemed to show (more) retuning of the /ɹ/ category than of the /l/ category, suggesting that non-native listeners can retune non-native phonetic categories. This asymmetry is argued to be related to the large phonetic variability of /r/ in both Dutch and English.

It is common practice in sociophonetics to measure vowel formants at one (monophthongs) or two (diphthongs) time points. This paper compares this traditional target approach with two dynamic approaches for investigating regional patterns of variation: the multiple time point approach, which measures formants at successive time points, and the regression approach, which estimates formant dynamics over time by fitting polynomial regression equations to formant contours. The speech material consisted of monosyllabic words containing all full vowels of Dutch, except for /y/. These words were read out by 160 speakers of Standard Dutch, who were distributed over four regions in the Netherlands and four regions in Flanders, Belgium. The results show that dynamic approaches outperform the target approach in uncovering regional vowel differences, which suggests that sociophonetic vowel studies that apply the target approach run the risk of overlooking important sociolinguistic patterns.

This paper reviews the available evidence in support of a diaglossic account(Auer 2005, 2011) of the 20th century history of Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch,whereby the national varieties of Dutch are argued to be developing towards astratificational configuration without discrete intermediate strata between thebase dialects and the standard. However, we show that the processes leading todiaglossia differ significantly in the two varieties. While the recent historyof Netherlandic Dutch is characterized by downward norm relaxation (top tobottom), Belgian Dutch is characterized by bottom-up (re)standardization.Building on a refined version of Auer’s diaglossic model, we reflecton the exact nature of linguistic standardization in the Low Countries andoutline scenarios for the further development of Belgian and NetherlandicDutch.

This paper reports a speaker evaluation experiment that investigated the competition between three regional accents of Standard Dutch and references to the speaker's profession as determinants of attitude formation. A stratified sample of listener-judges rated speech stimuli that were presented in two guises, a neutral guise and a teacher guise (the latter containing multiple references that revealed the speaker to be a high school teacher of Dutch). The experimental findings corroborate our earlier claim that regional flavoring is embedded in lay conceptualizations of Standard Dutch. Although teachers of Dutch may be the last “gatekeepers” of the standard in the Low Countries, they are not automatically downgraded when they have a regional accent: What matters is, clearly, which accent they have. Analysis of the ratings further suggests a hierarchical relation between accent and occupation as perception triggers: Even though regional accent clearly is the stronger attitude determinant, it does not suppress occupational information but interacts with it to generate richer social meaning.

It is evident that the Child Language Exchange System—CHILDES—will play a catalytic role in the study of first language acquisition. Plunkett rightly concludes that this system has the potential of bringing together work on first language acquisition from a wide range of theoretical and practical perspectives. The compilation of the CHILDES package, including a workbench with a set of computational tools, is an admirable achievement, which most certainly will have an impact on other branches in the study of language behaviour (e.g. discourse analysis, sociolinguistics).

In this article, we develop analytical techniques to determine borrowability – that is, the ease with which a lexical item or a category of lexical items can be borrowed. The analysis is based on two assumptions: (1) the distribution of items in both the host and donor language should be taken into account to explain why certain items are, and others are not, borrowed; (2) the borrowability of a lexical category may result from a set of (underlying) operative factors or constraints. Our analysis is applied to Spanish borrowings in Bolivian Quechua on the basis of a set of bilingual texts.

This article gives a detailed analysis of devoicing of the voiced fricatives /v/, /z/, /y/ in two varieties of Standard Dutch: Southern Standard Dutch (as spoken in Belgium) and Northern Standard Dutch (as spoken in The Netherlands). The study is based on archived recordings of radio broadcasts from 1935 to 1993. First, our study shows a divergence between Southern and Northern Standard Dutch in the pronunciation of voiced fricatives in this period. In The Netherlands there is a strong tendency towards devoicing, but in Belgium this tendency is very weak. Second, this study offers insight into the linguistic path of this change: partially voiced compromise variants play an important role, and devoicing is favored in word-initial position. Finally, our study shows the benefits of a retrospective trend study on the basis of radio recordings. In comparison with traditional real-time studies, it offers more insight into the social and linguistic embedding of changes in progress. Its results are also more reliable than those of apparent-time research.

This study describes how Turkish and Moroccan adults acquire Dutch possessive clauses in which the verb have expresses the possessive relationship. The acquisition process is explained within the framework of recent generative theory in which have-clauses are assumed to be copular locative constructions. In this theory, predicate inversion of the locative PP and incorporation of the locative P0 into a be-copula are the main characteristics of a possessive have-clause. Assuming that all linguistic knowledge of the L1 is present, L2 learners rely on it from the earliest stages, irrespective of whether this L1 knowledge is parameter-related or not. The results confirm such a “conservation” viewpoint, which accounts for how the possessive relationship is expressed in the earliest stages and why these learners have their language-specific difficulties in discovering the target have-construction. The results corroborate the conservation effect of both parametrized linguistic knowledge, viz., the strong features triggering predicate inversion, and non-parametrized knowledge, viz., knowledge of syntax, morphology and morphological realization rules, and properties of lexical items.