Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 52, Issue 1, 1995

This article provides an overview of the Second Sociolinguistic Conference, which was held in Lunteren (The Netherlands) from 18 to 19 May 1995. In particular, attention is focused on the topics and theories that turned out to play an important role at this conference. The article begins with a comparison between the contents of the First Sociolinguistic Conference (1991) and those of the Second Sociolinguistic Conference (1995). The papers presented are classified according to the topics they dealt with. The categories adopted in this overview are those used on earlier occasions by Muysken (1984) to assess developments in socio-linguistic research and by Van Hout, Huls & Verhallen (1991) in their presentation of the First Sociolinguistic Conference. Since any classification scheme is likely to be somewhat arbitrary, the same categorisation as in the above-mentioned two papers was used here for the sake of comparability.When the papers presented at the two Sociolinguistic Conferences are compared, it appears that 'bilingualism and language contact' and 'pragmatics, interaction, and conversation analysis' constitute the main topics in both cases. The most conspicuous change from 1991 to 1995 is a growing interest in the process of language acquisition by members of language minorities in the Netherlands and Flanders. An analysis of the papers presented at the 1995 conference, would seem to suggest that a considerable amount of sociolinguistic research is conducted without reference to a specific theory or conceptual framework. The consequences that this might have for the future of sociolinguistic research in the Netherlands and Flanders are briefly considered. Finally, a number of young sociolinguists were invited to reply to the rather provocative conclusion drawn in this article.

The article combines a performance centered approach with sociolinguistic interests. Humorous narratives among friends are shown to contain many features of verbal art, such as, i.e., fictionality, dialogue dramatization, a focus on wording, and a complex management of points of view. Narratives from two social groups are presented in an exemplary way. Although these stories share many perfor-mance features, they also reveal subtle differences. In the "judo group", narratives are often constructed which consist largely of phantasies. The joint production of humorous phantasies centers around one person in the group who is thereby made the center of attention. The men in the judo group often invent teasing stories about the women participants, and thereby a gendered interaction order is established. In the "academic group"1, many stories are told in which the members of this group present themselves as progressive individuals confronted with a not-so-progressive "normal" world. New gender norms are often implicitly thematized in these stories and thereby help to negotiate a new social order between men and women.

This article investigates some methodological problems involved in a discourse-centered exploration of societal ideologies, and in particular in an ongoing research program studying publicly accessible discourse in a number of European countries related to interethnic conflicts, the construction of ethnic or national identities, and nation-building processes. The proposal is made that a pragmatic concept of contrastiveness should be handled which captures forms of variability that are not only to be found between languages, but also within a single language, within one language variety, within one text, and even in one single sentence.

In the former colonial society of the Indies mixed languages came into being among Dutch migrants living together with a native woman. In this community of settlers and their Indo-european offspring, the native women were forced to speak Dutch, and imposed the structure of their own languages on Dutch. The result was a mixed language: the vocabulary being mainly Dutch and the structure Javanese (as in the case of Javindo) and Jakartan Malay (as in the case of Petjok). I will examine to what extent a characteristic of Javanese - the not-actor oriented verb morphology - has been preserved in Javindo, and a characteristic of both Javanese and Malay - the so-called topic deletion - has survived in Javindo and Petjok.

The 16-volume "Reeks Nederlandse Dialect-atlassen" - RND (Atlases of Dutch Dialects Series; 1925-1976), which was started by Edgar Blanquaert, is due of the major sources of the study of linguistic variety in Dutch and Frisian. Very positive evaluations have already been made by researchers in the field of linguistic geography. In the present contribution, it will be shown that also from a sociolinguistic point of view the RND can be considered a distinctly progressive project. This is clear from the method of fieldwork chosen (personal interviewing; narrow phonetic transcription; original data on display maps), from the choice of location (particular attention for the urban character) and from the selection criteria for informers (several informers per location, great attention for middle-class speakers and relatively young speakers). The sociolinguistic character is strengthened by the additional information in the section Taaitoestand' (socio-linguistic situation), in which a brief sociolinguistic description of the location studied is given. The information to the following aspects: the period during which fieldwork took place, the fieldworkers, Flanders versus the Netherlands, local variation and, finally, social variation.

Research in both Europe and America indicates that the way in which mass communication deals with ethnic minorities contributes directly and indirectly to the diffusion and the maintenance of prejudice against these groups. These are generally projected as problem categories in cultural and in socioeconomic sense. In this article we pay attention to the causes and functions of prejudice and especially to the role of mass communication media in this regard. Furthermore, attention is paid to the possibilities of and the extent to which the media can succeed in fighting against such negative attitudes towards the groups concerned. In this regard, a distinction is made between preventive and interven-tive strategies. Based on certain theories of social psychology on attitude forming and on the use and absorption of information it is concluded that though manipulation of attitude is not easily achieved, it is nevertheless possible. Various experi-ments in similar fields show that, under certain conditions, the supply of informa-tion through an adequate intervention strategy of the media can to some extent generate attitude change in the desired direction. However, such a positive result can only be achieved (1) if the basic thoughts underlying the prejudice concerned can be accurately identified; (2) if the difference between the information provided on the one hand and the existing information on the other is neither too weak nor too strong; (3) if the relevant information is provided by prominent persons and media in society; and (4) if the intended message emphasizes the positive rather than the negative similarities between minorities and the other groups. Because of the complexity of such an intervention process it is doubtfull whether the media can actually play an effective role in this context. Consequently, being attentive to the way in which the media provide information about the groups concerned is a more appropriate strategy in preventing the diffusion of prejudice. In this article, some relevant suggestions in this regard have been discussed.