Proposed research project

Semi-structured interviews with second generation immigrants in their teens and twenties about language innovations and language-related social standing.

Rules of interaction with Mocros: do not imitate them because they will laugh at you. Source: Partyflock.

Why this group?

As second generation immigrants will normally be fairly balanced bilinguals, they are likely to be primary agents of language innovation within their own community and beyond. This makes them an excellent group to test and elaborate on theories of contact-induced language change with, concerning borrowing and interference and the spread of these features throughout the community. Particular types of language innovations are known to be mostly done by teenagers, but an extension of the research could include contrastive interviews with adult members of the same community.

An example of such a group would be children of Morrocan immigrants in the Netherlands. At one hand their use of the Dutch language shows imposition (interference) of their first language, e.g. the application of determiners “deze” and “die” differs significantly from that of non-bilingual Dutch speakers (*wat is deze v. wat is dit; *die meisje vs dat meisje.) At the other hand it can be expected that their use of their first language would include borrowed items from Dutch. The social evaluation of such language innovations may add to or decrease the social standing of those who use them frequently: among second generation Moroccan immigrants a language variety dubbed Mocro has emerged, which has spread to Dutch natives of the same age. Its spread beyond the community indicates that it is seen as "prestigious": whoever speaks it is fairly cool.

Topics to discuss would include:

• To what extent are the interviewees conscious of their own language behaviour?
• Can they give examples of their L1 influencing their L2 and vice versa? How would they explain these language choices?
• Do bilingual speakers within the immigrant community have a better social standing? (This tests a theory posed by Gregory R. Guy (1990:4) that linguistic innovation in language contact situations usually takes place in the “upper stratum of the borrowing group” e.g. the L1 speakers with the highest social standing.)
• How are community members seen that do not make any of the imposition-related language “mistakes”, i.e. who speak the host language fluently? (Following the theory by William Labov that certain language changes are motivated by a sense of solidarity or local prestige, community members who speak the host language fluently can be expected to be regarded
  by other community members as lacking solidarity or as making an attempt to disassociate themselves from the community.)

Choosing a qualitative method rather than a quantitative one will allow for insight into the “why” and “how” of language change rather than just the “if”; through interviews the researcher can explore the deeper motivations of language choices in detail, which would not be possible or at least much harder through questionnaires with Likert-scale questions. The interviewees will benefit from the interviews in that their awareness of their own language behaviour and their own attitudes about social status will increase.