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In:The Sociolinguistics of Grammar
Edited by Tor A. Åfarli and Brit Mæhlum
[Studies in Language Companion Series 154] 2014
► pp. 67–90

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Language contact, linguistic variability and the construction of local identities

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Published online: 16 April 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.154.04cor
This paper focuses on “old” bidialectal and “new” bilingual language contact settings in the Netherlands combining insights from theoretical linguistics and sociolinguistics. It highlights some surprising conditions for language variation, namely the observation that in the bidialectal contact situation when a dialect feature (inalienable possessive dative construction) may disappear from the local dialect(s) it may be picked up as a feature of a new regional standard. In the bilingual contact situation, for some bilinguals the overgeneralization of the common definite determiner indexes “streetwise” identity formation. In sum, contact situations in bidialectal communities may lead to different linguistic outcomes but have similar social meanings whereas in bilingual communities similar linguistic outcomes are only meaningful for some speakers and not for others.
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Cornips, Leonie & Petra Sleeman
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Castro, Tammer, Jason Rothman & Marit Westergaard
2017. On the Directionality of Cross-Linguistic Effects in Bidialectal Bilingualism. Frontiers in Psychology 8 DOI logo
Cornips, Leonie
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2022. The Predictability of Social Stratification of Syntactic Variants. In Explanations in Sociosyntactic Variation, ► pp. 144 ff. DOI logo
Francot, R. J., K. Van den Heuij, E. Blom, W. Heeringa & L. Cornips
2017. Inter-individual variation among young children growing up in a bidialectal community. In Language variation – European perspectives VI [Studies in Language Variation, 19], ► pp. 85 ff. DOI logo
Cornips, Leonie M.E.A.
2014. Socio-syntax and variation in acquisition. Linguistic Variation 14:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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