< Back to previous page

Project

Finish your plate and clean up your language! A mixed methods approach to Colloquial Belgian Dutch and Standard Dutch variation inchild-directed speech at Flemish dinner table conversations.

This project studies variation in the way parents address their children, focusing on parents’ selection of Colloquial Belgian Dutch (‘tussentaal’, e.g. gij ‘you’) or Standard Belgian Dutch forms (e.g. jij ‘you’). Through structured variation between standard and vernacular, parents implicitly teach their children which language features (and varieties) to use in which context, hence at the same time revealing which language features they consider “best” in that particular context. Child-directed speech is thus not only a prime locus for research on (language) socialization, it also provides a new window into Flemish parents' attitudes towards Colloquial Belgian Dutch and Standard Dutch. To acquire a comprehensive view on the matter, a mixed methods approach is adopted, in which quantitative and qualitative approaches are integrated. This methodology is applied to an analysis of over sixty hours of recordings for fourteen different Flemish families in three different contexts: (1) family dinner table conversations in the family home, gathered through self-recordings; (2) interview settings in which parents are asked explicitly about their language regards; (3) observational contexts in which parents are deliberately placed in an artificial setting and are then asked to display casual conversation at the family dinner table. Together, these data help us uncover the complex interplay between awareness, context and interlocutor in variant selection in child-directed speech.

Date:1 Oct 2019 →  1 Sep 2021
Keywords:variation, discourse analysis, dialect, child-directed speech
Disciplines:Sociolinguistics
Project type:PhD project