A linguistic analysis of indexical markers of identity in Flemish job interviews in a changing recruitment context: A sociolinguistic-pragmatic mixed methods study

From the perspective of linguistic pragmatics and sociolinguistics, the construction of identity tends to be analyzed by, among others, drawing on the principle of indexicality which connects linguistic utterances to extra-linguistic reality. On the one hand, languages contain particular deictic elements (e.g. pronouns) which almost automatically entail some – locally highly variable – indexical force. On the other hand, any linguistic element may index particular context-related social meanings. A specific example concerning the Belgian Dutch linguascape is the fluid social meaning of different language varieties such as Colloquial Belgian Dutch and Belgian Standard Dutch. In this project, these indexical markers will be studied from a pragmatic ánd sociolinguistic perspective by means of a mixed methods approach. As data, Flemish job were chosen because these constitute an interesting context: i.e. they have changed a lot in the last decades in terms of the identities that recruiters and candidates construct, in particular because of the western workplace’s shift to the New Work Order as well as the emergence of the War for Talent in some segments of the recruitment context.

Keywords:indexicality, language variation in Flanders, deixis, identity

Disciplines:Dutch language, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics