On a first-name basis: Englishization and naming in Flanders

Following and contributing to the ongoing shift from more structuralist, system-oriented to more pragmatic, socio-cultural oriented anglicism research, this paper verifies to what extent the global spread of English affects naming patterns in Flanders. To this end, a diachronic database of first names is constructed, containing the top 75 most popular boy and girl names from 2005 until 2014. In a first step, the etymological background of these names is documented and the evolution in popularity of the English names in the database is tracked. Results reveal no notable surge in the preference for English names. This paper complements these database-driven results with an experimental study, aiming to show how associations through referents are in this case more telling than associations through phonological form (here based on etymology). Focusing on the socio-cultural background of first names in general and of Anglo-American pop culture in particular, the second part of the study specifically reports on results from a survey where participants are asked to name the first three celebrities that leap to mind when hearing a certain first name (e.g. Lana, triggering the response Del Rey). Very clear associations are found between certain first names and specific celebrities from Anglo-American pop culture. Linking back to marketing research and the social turn in onomastics, we will discuss how these celebrities might function as referees, and how social stereotypes surrounding these referees are metonymically attached to their first names. Similar to the country-of-origin-effect in marketing, these metonymical links could very well be the reason why parents select specific “celebrity names”. Although further attitudinal research is needed, this paper supports the importance of including socio-cultural parameters when conducting onomastic research

Gepimpte data! From English TV show to Dutch verb in less than three years

peer reviewe

Big Pimpin’. Een big data-benadering van de verspreiding van het leenwoord pimpen in het Nederlands

peer reviewedThis article illustrates some of the opportunities and challenges of pursuing a big data approach in linguistic research. To do so, we investigate the diffusion of the loan verb pimpen ‘to fancify’ in Dutch based on Twitter data. First, we focus on the derivations of the verb (e.g.: terugpimpen ‘to pimp back’, herpimpen ‘to repimp’, etc.) and plot the diversity of these forms through time, using the Chao-Wang-Jost estimation of Shannon entropy. We follow this up with an alternation study that compares pimpen not only to its ‘native’ alternative opleuken, but also its most frequent derivation oppimpen, using multinomial regression. It is found that, while pimpen’s early expansion in Dutch has proceeded at breakneck speed, resulting e.g. in a plethora of derivations that has so far gone undetected, its current momentum seems to be waning

Linguistic repercussions of COVID-19 : A corpus study on four languages

The global reach of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing localized policy reactions provides a case to uncover how a global crisis translates into linguistic discourse. Based on the JSI Timestamped Web Corpora that are automatically POS-tagged and accessible via SketchEngine, this study compares French, German, Dutch, and English. After identifying the main names used to denote the virus and its disease, we extracted a total of 1,697 associated terms (according to logDice values) retrieved from news media data from January through October 2020. These associated words were then organized into categories describing the properties of the virus and the disease, their spatio-temporal features and their cause–effect dependencies. Analyzing the output cross-linguistically and across the first 10 months of the pandemic, a fairly stable semantic discourse space is found within and across each of the four languages, with an overall clear preference for visual and biomedical features as associated terms, though significant diatopic and diachronic shifts in the discourse space are also attested.Peer reviewe

Het Nederlands wordt bedreigd door het Engels ... Or not?

status: publishe

Core vocabulary, borrowability, and entrenchment. A usage-based onomasiological approach

status: publishe

A concept-based approach to measuring the success of loanwords

status: publishe

De invloed van het Engels op het Nederlands

status: publishe

Macro- en microperspectieven op het gebruik van Engels in Nederlandse en Vlaamse personeelsadvertenties

status: publishe

And she was like "Oh my God!" Valspeak: de verspreiding van een sociolect

status: publishe