English in Flemish adolescents’ computer-mediated discourse

The paper focuses on the presence of English in a written chat corpus produced by Flemish teenagers whose native language is (a variety of) Dutch: it deals with the relative presence of several lexemes and word categories, with the effect on the target language and with the way the loans are integrated into teenager chatspeak, i.e. with (g)localisation processes. In quantitative terms, the impact of English on the informal “speech” of Flemish teenagers appears to be considerable, but the borrowing process is not a copy-and-paste practice. In many cases the teenagers transform the English words graphemically, morphologically and/or semantically. By using an extensive and reliable corpus and by quantifying and categorizing the English tokens in several ways, this paper aims at describing a representative case study for the appropriation of English by a generation the socialization process of which partly proceeds via electronic media.