A sociolinguistic analysis of borrowing in weak contact situations: English loanwords and phrases in expressive utterances in a Dutch reality TV show. (June 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Zenner, Eline; Speelman, Dirk; Geeraerts, Dirk
• Is Part Of: International journal of bilingualism. Volume 19:Number 3(2015)
• Page Start: 333
• Page End: 346
• Publication Date: 2015-06
• Subjects: Anglicisms -- Dutch -- lexical borrowing -- reality TV -- variationist analyses -- weak contact; Bilingualism -- Periodicals; Bilingualism -- Research -- Periodicals; Language acquisition -- Periodicals; 306.446072
• DOI: 10.1177/1367006914521699
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1367-0069

Abstract

This paper presents a quantitative corpus-based variationist analysis of the English insertions used by Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch participants to the reality TV show 'Expeditie Robinson'. The data consist of manual transcriptions of 35 hours of recordings for 46 speakers from 3 seasons of the show. Focusing on the expressive utterances in the corpus, we present a mixed-effect logistic regression analysis to pattern which of a variety of speaker-related and context-related features can help explain the occurrence of English insertions in Dutch. The results show a strong impact of typical variationist variables such as gender, age and location; but features that are more situational, such as emotional charge and topic of the conversation, also prove relevant. Overall, in its combined focus on (a) oral corpora of spontaneous language use, (b) social patterns in the use of English and (c) inferential statistical modeling, this paper presents new perspectives on the study of Anglicisms in weak contact settings.