Taalbehoud en Taalverschuiving

The results are presented of a study in which sociolinguistic language use patterns and structural characteristics of the language of three generations of Dutch immigrants to New Zealand were investigated. Language maintenance is defined as the maintenance of the L1 at one or more levels of language use, while language shift can be defined as the change in language use by an individual or a group of speakers. In a sociolinguistic questionnaire, the subjects had to report on their use of the Dutch language in domains inside and outside the home. An oral interview was conducted to establish the amount of structural language loss. The results were found to support the hypothesis based on earlier work (e.g. De Bot & Clyne, 1994; Folmer, 1991) that predicted a high level of intra- and intergenerational language shift. Structural-linguistic language loss was found to be limited, which is also in line with other findings.