This study investigates language use and code switching (CS) in parliamentary sessions of the People’s Council of Representatives in Aceh, Indonesia. Three recordings of plenary sessions of the...Show moreThis study investigates language use and code switching (CS) in parliamentary sessions of the People’s Council of Representatives in Aceh, Indonesia. Three recordings of plenary sessions of the Council were transcribed and used as data sources for the research. The study used transcriptions to obtain frequency and syntactic constructions and interviews with speakers of Acehnese to obtain social functions and perceived attitudes toward CS. It was found that the use of Acehnese relative to Indonesian and other languages in the parliamentary was 26.5% in terms of word count and 3.3% in terms of continuous speech duration and furthermore could be classified as CS wherein Acehnese served either as Matrix and Embedded Language based on Matrix Language Framework (MLF – Myers-Scotton and Jake, 2009). The CS were mostly intersentential in both direction and extrasentential CS were found only from Indonesian to Acehnese. In addition, the CS mainly functioned as a manner of quotation and interlocutor addressing. This study contributed to a better understanding of language and code switching in politically-motivated settings in Aceh or other multilingual regions in Indonesia. Future research in this area could focus on the intellectual and political factors underlying deliberate code switching.Show less
In film and television, actors are sometimes expected to speak in a particular accent in order to convey their character’s identity as accurately as possible. A term in sociolinguistic research...Show moreIn film and television, actors are sometimes expected to speak in a particular accent in order to convey their character’s identity as accurately as possible. A term in sociolinguistic research fields that describes this connection between identity and language is indexicality: it “refers to the way an observable linguistic fact can be indexical of social identities in the same way, for instance, that clothing can. Language features can thus be semiotic signs associated with such identities.” (Smakman 2018: 57). Filmmakers make use of this fact when they include a specific dialect in their films: “film uses language variation and accent to draw character quickly, building on established preconceived notions associated with specific loyalties, ethnic, racial or economic alliances” (Lippi-Green 1997: 81). However, as the actors in film may be required to speak in an accent that is different than their own, inaccuracies can occur in their pronunciation, which may lead to linguistic stereotyping, appropriation or even racism. In this thesis, I examined this phenomenon in relation to the Birmingham (or, ‘Brummie’) accent, which is spoken in the series Peaky Blinders. I first established the most prototypical accent features of the Birmingham accent by comparing several sources, after which I analysed the use of these features in the speech of native speakers and actors. I then juxtaposed the differences in frequency and consistency between the pronunciation of the native speakers and actors, and several patterns emerged. These patterns could all be related to four sociophonetic processes detected by Bell and Gibson in a similar study: selectivity, mis-realisation, overshoot and undershoot (2011: 568). It was then found that these sociophonetic processes can account for the inaccuracies that may occur in actors’ accent use, which ultimately pointed out that there is, in fact, a correlation between dialect use in film and linguistic stereotyping.Show less
This thesis examined which pronunciation of the three existing variants of the English swearword fucking, which are FAKKING ([fɑkɪŋ]), FUKKING ([fʏkɪŋ]), or FOKKING ([fɔkɪŋ]), is L1 Dutch speakers’...Show moreThis thesis examined which pronunciation of the three existing variants of the English swearword fucking, which are FAKKING ([fɑkɪŋ]), FUKKING ([fʏkɪŋ]), or FOKKING ([fɔkɪŋ]), is L1 Dutch speakers’ preferred use. In addition to this, this thesis studied which variant is considered most offensive to Dutch speakers. An experiment was conducted in which 50 L1 Dutch speakers were interviewed on these issues. In addition, a smaller second experiment was conducted in which an L1 English speaker was interviewed via email on the offensiveness of the word fucking to a native speaker of English and on their opinion on Dutch speakers using it. The results of the main experiment suggested that the ‘nativeness’ or ‘Dutchness’ of the pronunciation is the main influence on offensiveness ranking, not sound iconicity, which was originally hypothesised to be the main influencing factor.Show less
Elements of English have been infiltrating Dutch casual speech to great extent (Edwards, 2016). Not only loans from English can be found; elements that are not fully accepted into the language, but...Show moreElements of English have been infiltrating Dutch casual speech to great extent (Edwards, 2016). Not only loans from English can be found; elements that are not fully accepted into the language, but that are merely a replacement of English elements for Dutch words, are also present in Dutch. This phenomenon (called code-switching) has been described by various researchers already, such as in Clyne (1987), and more specifically in Dutch by scholars such as Zenner and Geeraerts (2015). However, none of the existing studies have researched the grammatical structure of codeswitching to English in Dutch, or which particular speakers of Dutch are more inclined to use codeswitching. This report investigated whether there are patterns to be found in the use of codeswitching to English by speakers of Dutch; specifically grammatical, semantic and sociolinguistic patterns. The database for this research consisted of a Dutch TV programme called “First Dates” as a primary source for instances of codeswitching, for it contains casual Dutch conversations in an unscripted setting. In total, 421 instances of codeswitching to English were found in the dataset and analysed in terms of length, word category, semantic field, intentionality, creativity and pronunciation. The speakers’ sociolinguistic features, i.e. age, gender, social class and sexual preference, were also included in the analysis. Among other things, the speakers showed a tendency towards short codeswitches in various semantic categories and most of the codeswitches were intentional and uncreative in their structure. Additionally, speakers belonging to youth and gay communities were found to codeswitch very often, whereas social class or gender did not seem to affect the speakers’ codeswitching behaviour. Implications that can be interpreted from the results are the following: the elements of English seem to be integrated into Dutch speech to great extent; generally, unintentional codeswitching may be used to relate to cultural phenomena; and intentional codeswitching is possibly used in a conversational manner. Moreover, socio-pragmatic motivations for codeswitching is likely to involve constructing identity or indexing membership of a cultural subgroup. Hence, these patterns assist in providing a deeper understanding of codeswitching to English, i.e. what kind of tendencies there are on structural, semantic and socio-pragmatic levels, and, more generally, day-to-day language use of speakers of Dutch.Show less
