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Chapter 4. Cité Duits

A polyethnic miners’ variety
  • Peter Auer and Leonie Cornips
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The Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging
This chapter is in the book The Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging

Abstract

In the late 1930s and 1940s, locally born children of immigrant coal miners in Tuinwijk, a neighborhood in the village of Eisden in Belgian Limburg, developed a way of speaking among themselves which they later labelled Cité Duits. Having become coal miners themselves, they continued to use Cité Duits as an in-group language throughout their lives when working underground as well as in their private lives. We will show that Cité Duits is a hybrid variety resulting from combining elements of German, Belgian Dutch and the Maasland dialect spoken in Belgian Limburg through focusing and sedimentation. We argue that Cité Duits developed and continues to be employed as a symbolic language for expressing group identity

Abstract

In the late 1930s and 1940s, locally born children of immigrant coal miners in Tuinwijk, a neighborhood in the village of Eisden in Belgian Limburg, developed a way of speaking among themselves which they later labelled Cité Duits. Having become coal miners themselves, they continued to use Cité Duits as an in-group language throughout their lives when working underground as well as in their private lives. We will show that Cité Duits is a hybrid variety resulting from combining elements of German, Belgian Dutch and the Maasland dialect spoken in Belgian Limburg through focusing and sedimentation. We argue that Cité Duits developed and continues to be employed as a symbolic language for expressing group identity

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Chapter 1. Introduction 1
  4. Part I. Interpersonal relations, place, and belonging
  5. Chapter 2. The boundaries of belonging 17
  6. Chapter 3. Language socialization and making sense of place 27
  7. Chapter 4. Cité Duits 55
  8. Chapter 5. Us, them and all the others 89
  9. Part II. Parodic performances from the margins
  10. Chapter 6. Playing against peripheralization 115
  11. Chapter 7. The politics of place-making and belonging through language choice within center-periphery dynamics in Limburg, The Netherlands 125
  12. Chapter 8. Peripheral performances 149
  13. Chapter 9. What’s up in town 177
  14. Part III. Agency in linguistic place-making
  15. Chapter 10. Language, place, agency 207
  16. Chapter 11. Place-making and dialect 213
  17. Chapter 12. Alternative place naming in the diverse margins of an ideologically mono-lingual society 239
  18. Chapter 13. Yooperisms in tourism 261
  19. Subject index 287
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.45.04aue

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Chapter 1. Introduction 1
  4. Part I. Interpersonal relations, place, and belonging
  5. Chapter 2. The boundaries of belonging 17
  6. Chapter 3. Language socialization and making sense of place 27
  7. Chapter 4. Cité Duits 55
  8. Chapter 5. Us, them and all the others 89
  9. Part II. Parodic performances from the margins
  10. Chapter 6. Playing against peripheralization 115
  11. Chapter 7. The politics of place-making and belonging through language choice within center-periphery dynamics in Limburg, The Netherlands 125
  12. Chapter 8. Peripheral performances 149
  13. Chapter 9. What’s up in town 177
  14. Part III. Agency in linguistic place-making
  15. Chapter 10. Language, place, agency 207
  16. Chapter 11. Place-making and dialect 213
  17. Chapter 12. Alternative place naming in the diverse margins of an ideologically mono-lingual society 239
  18. Chapter 13. Yooperisms in tourism 261
  19. Subject index 287
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