Playing with English. The evolution of Belgian Dutch preadolescent children’s use of and reflection on English as a socio-pragmatically meaningful lexical resource

This project contributes in three ways to the upcoming field of developmental sociolinguistics, which studies children’s acquisition of community norms regarding language variation. Studies to date mostly pattern the production of standard and vernacular phonetic variants in preschoolers. Instead, this project foregrounds (1) contact-induced lexical variation (2) in the transition between childhood and adolescence (3) imbuing the language production perspective with attention for language awareness. Particularly, four types of data are studied to uncover Belgian Dutch preadolescents' production and awareness of English words and phrases in Dutch (e.g. ‘superhero’, ‘oh my God’). Research has revealed these children’s high receptive knowledge of English, yet less is known on when and why they use English spontaneously in Dutch. Acquiring this insight will overall advance our understanding of the relationship between language acquisition, language contact and language change.