Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 62, Issue 1, 1999

This article provides an overview of the Third Sociolinguistics Conference, which was held in Lunteren (The Netherlands) on 8 and 9 March 1999. In particular, attention is focussed on the topics and theories that turned out to play ah important role at this conference. The article begins with a comparison between the contents of the First and Second Sociolinguistics Conferences (1991; 1995) and those of the third conference (1999). 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 sociolinguistic research and by Van Hout, Huls & Verhallen (1992) and Cucchiarini & Huls (1995) in their presentation of the First and Second Sociolinguistics Conferences. Since any classification scheme is likely to be somewhat arbitrary, the same categorisation as in the above-mentioned three papers was used for the sake of comparability.When analysing the content of all the papers presented at the third conference, it appears that four main topics can be distinguished. Two of them are the same as four years ago: 'multilingualism and language contact' and 'pragmatics, interaction and conversation analysis'. Two of them are new: language acquisition and socialisation' and language variation and language change'. The growing interest in the process of language acquisition by members of language minorities in the Netherlands and Flanders, appears to be structural. In 1999, almost half of the contributions are related to this subject. More so than four years ago, the research presented at the conference is embedded in theories or conceptual frameworks. However, they are so diverse that they do not lead to thematic unity. We may perhaps conclude that it is this diversification that gives sociolinguistics its force and vitality

The article shows the rise of English and the decline of German and French as inter-national languages of science in the 20th century. It depicts the course of this development on the basis of statistical data as well as suggesting explanations for it.It then focusses on the consequences for the declining languages of science, especially German, and their communities, which are, among other things: domain limitation of the national language within the communities, slow-down of lexical modernization, the unpreparedness of scientists for the new situation and their absencefrom the international scene, and increased costs and difficulties for publishers in competing with publishers of the Anglophone countries.One way of ameliorating the situation would be more linguistic tolerance on the Anglophone side towards non-native English, or even the "non-native speakers' right to linguistic peculiarities". Another possibility seems to be to introduce English as a language of teaching at the universities of the other language communities, which is presently happening in Germany but might have highly problematic side-effects.

'Street language' is a kind of register, spoken by young people in Amsterdam and probably also by young people in other multi-ethnic, multilingual cities in the Netherlands. This paper reports on an explorative study of this relatively recently developed register. Street language seems to be comparable to other (monolingual) forms of youth language with respect to its function. The emergence of a mixed youth language has also been observed in other countries, for example in Sweden (Kotsinas, 1998) and Germany (Auer & Dirim, 1998). 133 students in three different schools for secondary education filled out a written questionnaire on street language. This instrument is not really appropriate for a typically spoken, informal variety, but it offered us the opportunity to collect data from a large group of respondents. The data were supplemented with information from a few informal interviews and with information from newspaper articles and television programmes on street language. 98 of the 133 students said that they used street language, boys rather more so than girls, a trend also observed in research on this subject in other countries. Especially children with Surinamese as their home language (in most cases next to Dutch) spoke street language. Students with a relatively low proficiency in Dutch (probably recently arrived) often reported that they did not speak street language. This was also the case with students who claimed to have a good proficiency in one of the following minority languages: Turkish, Moroccan-Arabic and Tamazight. Street language is (of course) most frequendy used in the streets, and also at school in informal interactions between students. Street language is used because it is funny, it is tough and because friends use it too. The respondents were also asked to give (no more than) eight examples of words or expressions in street language (with a translation in Dutch). They provided 468 words or expressions (tokens) in total. The total number of different forms (types) was 151. Most of the words and expressions came from Surinamese. Furthermore, there were words from English, and only a few words from other languages like Turkish and Moroccan-Arabic. Also some new (Dutch) words in the register of youth language were provided. Street language seems to contain quite a lot of more or less standard verbal routines. For outsiders the language sometimes seems to be (sexually) aggressive. Speakers of youth language claim that this aggressiveness is softened by the use of words and expressions from other languages.

The use of language in the mass media is an act of identity. The media offer us representations of the identities of groups and individuals, and are even implicated in the very nature of contemporary identity. Drawing on the work of the British socio-logist Anthony Giddens on late modernity, this paper examines four aspects of identity in contemporary society, and illustrates and evidences them by analysis of New Zealand television advertisements. Firstly, human identity in the late modern age is 'reflexive', by which the media and their language reflect back images of the self. Secondly, modern identity is at least in part a 'narrative of the self, and many advertisements frame their appeal as aspects of personal biographies, including in particular personal choices and the lifestyle which constitutes them. Thirdly, the media are the crucial technologies in the re-organisation of time and place in the modern wodd, and offer a wodd for consumption. Lastly, the media are the means by which the global reaches into the local, and the local can be disseminated to the rest of the globe. These characteristics are manifested and identifiable across all levels of language.

Like English, Dutch has a case distinction in the pronoun of the third person plural. English makes a distinction between they versus them, Dutch distinguishes zij and hen/ bun (in addition to the reduced forms ze). Nowadays, hun occurs frequently in large areas of the Netherlands as a subject pronoun. Its use is largely restricted to spoken Dutch, but it provokes strong feelings of abhorrence among the gatekeepers of a correct standard Dutch. This contribution gives an overview of the linguistic and sociolinguistic data available and of the types of explanation put forward to account for the sudden rise of this oblique form in subject position. (New) dialect-geographical data presented lead to the formulation of a framework which redefines and integrates linguistic and socio-linguistic explanations or effects. An important feature of the framework is the interaction between the different effects responsible for the strong rise of hun (='them') in subject position.

There is an increasing awareness that the number of non-native speakers in the category of 'adult, highly educated, advanced L2-learners' is rapidly increasing. This paper presents an analysis of what it means to teach them a second language - whether it is Dutch or any other second language. It is argued that, on the one hand, conceptions about language learning and teaching are insufficiendy known, and that, on the other hand, there are many widespread misconceptions that prevent language teachers from catering adequately for people's actual communicative needs, and from providing tailor-made solutions to these problems.