Stefania Marzo

The use of Citétaal among adolescents in Limburg: the role of space appropriation in language variation and change

Abstract The term Citétaal was originally used to refer to the language spoken by Italian immigrants in the Eastern part of Flanders (Limburg) and diffused in the former ghettoised mining areas (the cité). It is a melting pot language, based on Dutch but with a high amount of code mixture from immigrant languages, mostly Italian and Turkish. Recently, its use seems to be spreading among speakers in Limburg and particularly in the area of Genk, which is the city with the highest concentration of speakers with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In this paper, we investigate to what extent and in what contexts Citétaal is currently used by adolescents in Limburg by means of a quantitative questionnaire study and qualitative analysis of focus group interviews. The quantitative results show that both speakers with immigrant and non-immigrant backgrounds use Citétaal and consider it primarily as intended for peer communication. Furthermore, the interview data suggests that Citétaal is shifting from marking ethnicity to indexing a new, localised identity of which its emergence seems to be related to the mechanism of enregisterment. Based on our findings, we conclude that the appropriation of space functions as a catalyst force for language variation and change.

Standard and Colloquial Belgian Dutch pronouns of address: A variationist-interactional study of child-directed speech in dinner table interactions

Abstract This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of child-directed speech during Flemish family dinner table interactions. Specifically, we study parents’ style-shifts, that is, their alternation between Standard Dutch and Colloquial Belgian Dutch, a non-standard supraregional variant of Dutch, when interacting with their children. By integrating insights and methods from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, we pay attention not only to macro-social categories (such as the age of the children), but also to the micro-social and pragmatic context (e. g. frames) of the style-shifts. The fact that this study focuses on a single case-study is a consequence of opting for this combination of course-grained quantitative analyses and fine-grained qualitative analyses. We rely on detailed transcriptions of three hours of recordings for one Flemish household with four children (age nine months, and four, five and seven years old). Our results reveal significant variation in the style-shifts of the mother (age 35) and the father (age 39) with respect to the four children. These results were interpreted against the background of comments made by the parents during a sociolinguistic interview that followed the recordings. Generally, our analyses allow us to provide a nuanced insight into the social meaning of the two language layers (Standard Dutch and Colloquial Belgian Dutch) as they are distributed across the speakers and situations in this family, thus revealing a link between the attested patterns of child-directed speech and the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms.

Exploring the social meaning of contemporary urban vernaculars: Perceptions and attitudes about Citétaal in Flanders

This paper aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the social meaning of a contemporary urban vernacular called Citétaal (Citélanguage). While most studies on the perception of urban vernaculars have applied qualitative discursive methods, we investigate the perception of and attitudes towards Citétaal by combining a qualitative and quantitative approach. In a discursive analysis of online surveys and social media networks, we analyze how this variety is perceived and represented on a collective level, and in comparison to other varieties, such as standard Dutch and regional Limburg Flemish. These insights are used to organize a speaker evaluation experiment (n=95) in which we verify to what extent the various meanings in the indexical field of Citétaal occur on the individual level of the listener’s mind and how they are structured. We will also measure the listener’s ability to guess the speaker’s ethnic and regional origin. The qualitative data will be further used to interpret the results of the experiment. It will be shown that although social meanings of Citétaal strongly vary within the community, they are clearly regimented by prevailing standard language ideologies. Citétaal is still perceived as a vernacular spoken by foreign speakers, and its social meanings fluctuate between values of low social status and high attractiveness. The opposition (considered as distance) between speaker attractiveness and status is the highest for Citétaal and the lowest for standard Dutch, which suggests that social meanings of standard Dutch are more stable and widely accepted throughout the Flemish community. The conclusions highlight the importance of combining qualitative and quantitative methods when studying perceptions and attitudes in order to provide a fuller understanding of the social meaning of urban vernaculars in the larger community.

The neo-standard of Italy and elsewhere in Europe

This epilogue tentatively puts the Italian neo-standard in a European perspective by outlining some of the parallel developments in other European languages, particularly German. The notion of a neo-standard is profiled against related concepts such as regional standards and regional sub-standards. The relationship between demoticization and destandardization is discussed.

How standard regional Italians set in: the case of standard Piedmontese Italian

This chapter will focus on standard Piedmontese Italian, i.e. the standard variety of Italian spoken and written in the northwestern region of Piedmont. First of all, I will sketch the sociolinguistic dynamics lying beneath the formation of both regional and standard regional Italian, and discuss the concepts of destandardization and restandardization, with relation to the ItaloRomance context. I will then examine three syntactic features lato sensu, their degree of standardness in Piedmontese Italian being tentatively proved by their occurrence in spoken and written model texts: 1) a phonotactic phenomenon, i.e. the selection of the definitive articles lo ‘the’ (singular) and gli ‘the’ (plural) before suocero ‘father-in-law’ / suoceri ‘fathers-in-law’, whereas standard Italian would only allow the selection of il and i (thus, il suocero / i suoceri); 2) a lexical/ morphosyntactic element, i.e. the focus particle solo più ‘lit. only more’, which has no correspondent in standard Italian; and 3) a morphosyntactic construction, i.e. the omission of the preverbal negation when a postverbal negative quantifier or a postverbal negative reinforcer is used (e.g. importa niente ‘it does not matter’, lit. ‘it matters nothing’, as opposed to standard Italian non importa niente, lit. ‘it does not matter nothing’). The interpretation of the data will be suggested in terms of both simplification/complexification patterns, assessing if a new standard feature simplifies or complicates the linguistic system, and source language/recipient language agentivity, following Frans Van Coetsem’s model of language contact phenomena.

Changes from below, changes from above: relative constructions in contemporary Italian

This chapter addresses the range of relative const ructions in contemporary Italian as a case in point for the investigation of the main sociolingui stic dynamics characterizing the ongoing process of restandardization. I assume that standard Italian d oes not coincide with the highest poles of diaphasi a and diastratia, and hence that there exist varietie s lower than standard (i.e. informal speech and low social varieties), referred to as ub-standard varieties, and varieties higher than standard (i.e bureaucratic, refined formal and educated varieties ), r ferred to as upra-standard varieties. Drawing on the results of recent corpus-based studies, evid ence will be presented to show that both some substandard relative constructions and some supra-stan dard relative constructions are actually moving towards neo-standard Italian. Such changes may fit in with the Labovian distinction between changes from below and changes from above: sub-standard con structions are extending their reach beyond the vernacular by being used in speech across social cl asses (a few of them are even emerging in written formal varieties), while supra-standard constructio ns are emerging in model texts as prestigious features introduced by highly educated social class es (and do not occur in the vernacular).

Towards a New Standard. Theoretical and Empirical Studies on the Restandardization of Italian

In many European languages the National Standard Variety is converging with spoken, informal, and socially marked varieties. In Italian this process is giving rise to a new standard variety called Neo-standard Italian, which partly consists of regional features. This book contributes to current research on standardization in Europe by offering a comprehensive overview of the re-standardization dynamics in Italian. Each chapter investigates a specific dynamic shaping the emergence of Neo-standard Italian and Regional Standard Varieties, such as the acceptance of previously non-standard features, the reception of Old Italian features excluded from the standard variety, the changing standard language ideology, the retention of features from Italo-Romance dialects, the standardization of patterns borrowed from English, and the developmental tendencies of standard Italian in Switzerland. The contributions investigate phonetic/phonological, prosodic, morphosyntactic, and lexical phenomena, addressed by several empirical methodologies and theoretical vantage points. This work is of interest to scholars and students working on language variation and change, especially those focusing on standard languages and standardization dynamics.

Corpus studies in contrastive linguistics

1. Introduction 2. Developments in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics (by Marzo, Stefania) 3. Articles 4. Believe-type raising-to-object and raising-to-subject verbs in English and Dutch: A contrastive investigation in diachronic construction grammar (by Noel, Dirk) 5. Contingency hedges in Dutch, French and English: A corpus-based contrastive analysis of the language-internal and -external properties of English depend, French dependre and Dutch afhangen, liggen and zien (by Defrancq, Bart) 6. Cultural differences in academic discourse: Evidence from first-person verb use in the methods sections of medical research articles (by Williams, Ian A.) 7. Cognitive verbs in context: A contrastive analysis of English and French argumentative discourse (by Fetzer, Anita) 8. Mood and modality in finite noun complement clauses: A French-English contrastive study (by Kante, Issa) 9. Choice of strategies in realizations of epistemic possibility in English and Lithuanian: A corpus-based study (by Usoniene, Aurelia)