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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 366

Part of Session 134: Multilingual written internet data in language contact studies (Other abstracts in this session)

(G)local identity construction: the appropriation of English in the chat language of Flemish teenagers

Authors: De Decker, Benny; Vandekerckhove, Reinhild
Submitted by: De Decker, Benny (Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium)

The research we want to report on is based on an extensive written chat language corpus (nearly one million words) produced by Flemish teenagers from the central provinces of Brabant and Antwerp. The paper focuses on the presence and exploitation of English in the corpus and combines a quantitative and a qualitative approach.

The dominant variety in the chat discourse of the teenagers is a mixed code which combines standard Dutch, supraregional Flemish and local dialect features. In addition, most chatters insert English words and to a minor extent English phrases in their chat discourse. Although Dutch always remains the matrix language, the impact of English appears to be considerable in quantitative terms. The data reveal the multilingual practices of a generation the socialization process of which partly proceeds via electronic media which, especially for the die-hard gamers amongst them, are essentially English oriented.

The paper deals with the relative presence of several word categories amongst the English loans, with the switch types, and with the way the loan words are integrated into the teenager chatspeak.  Through graphematic, morphological and semantic adaptations the teenagers appropriate the English loans and “localize” them to a minor or major extent (cf. Androutsopoulos 2010).  This combination of endogenous (local) and exogenous (global) elements into one single lexeme results in ‘glocalisation’ on a micro-linguistic level. Generally speaking, the chat practice of the Flemish teenagers reveals an eagerness both to adopt English and to turn the loans into words or phrases that will appear appropriate, fancy and even playful to the local audience. While the graphematic adaptations are typical creative products of the written chat medium, the other adaptations may occur in the spoken interaction of these teenagers as well. Consequently the chat data seem to offer an intensification of a double dynamics which most probably transcends the medium (or can be assumed to do so): the ‘foreignness’ of English is at the same time fostered and neutralized. The global language is exploited for local peer group identity construction.

Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2010): Localizing the Global on the Participatory Web.  In: N. Coupland : The handbook of  language and globalization, 203-231. Oxford: Blackwell.