Strange bedfellows. Appropriations of a tainted urban dialect.

Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/4, 2011: 493–524

Strange bedfellows: Appropriationsof a tainted urban dialect1

Jurgen JaspersResearch Foundation Flanders and University of Antwerp, Belgium

Teenagers often appropriate dialect features they find attractive. This paperargues that unattractive dialect features can also become a target for teenageconstructions of linguistic style. Based on an ethnographic case study ata multi-ethnic school in Antwerp, Belgium, it is shown that Antwerpdialect for non-white students conjured up angry white and/or racist voices,and that it was frequently stylised as a way of speaking associated withothers. At the same time, however, these students produced stylisations thatwere in synchrony with their own voice and self-presentation when theyrecruited Antwerp dialect features to underline assertiveness and to distancethemselves from recent, linguistically incompetent, arrivals. It is argued thatAntwerp dialect’s tainted connotations were outweighed by its value as atool for shaping a working-class, non-immigrant identity.

Tieners eigenen zich vaak dialectkenmerken toe die ze aantrekkelijk vinden.Dit artikel toont aan hoe ook onaantrekkelijke dialectkenmerken het doelwitkunnen vormen voor tieners wanneer ze hun talige stijl construeren.Gebaseerd op etnografisch veldwerk op een multi-etnische secundaire schoolin Antwerpen, Belgie, zal aangetoond worden dat voor niet-blanke studentenhet Antwerps dialect de stem opriep van boze blanken en/of racisten,en dat het regelmatig gestileerd werd als een manier van spreken diemet anderen werd geassocieerd. Tegelijkertijd produceerden deze studentenechter stileringen die veeleer in harmonie waren met hun eigen stem enzelfpresentatie wanneer ze Antwerpse dialectkenmerken rekruteerden omassertiviteit te onderstrepen en zich te distantieren van talig incompetentenieuwkomers. Er zal worden betoogd dat de gekleurde connotaties van hetAntwerps dialect werden tenietgedaan vanwege z’n grote bruikbaarheid inde constructie van een uit Antwerpen afkomstige arbeidersidentiteit. [Dutch]

KEYWORDS: Dialect appropriation, Antwerp dialect, teenagers,stylisation, style, school interaction

1. INTRODUCTION

Dialect appropriation, or incorporation of dialectal features into one’s routineregister, has been a salient issue in sociolinguistics. In many studies, the focusis often on how young white speakers attempt to acquire minority vernacular

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features, often in the hope of partaking in activities that are associated withthese minority vernaculars, such as music scenes, street or gang cultures, orpopular youth culture overall (see e.g. Auer and Dirim 2003; Bucholtz 1999;Cutler 1999; Hewitt 1986; Nortier and Dorleijn 2008; Rampton 1995). In mypaper I look in the opposite direction and discuss how non-white teenagersappropriate a traditional urban dialect that is not associated with popular youthcultures but is rather identified as unbecomingly white, old-fashioned and evenracist. To explain the making of these strange bedfellows I will be attending tohow the dialect is stylised, that is, to how it is intensified and exaggerated bythese teenagers in their daily interaction at school, and to how these stylisationsrelate to their routine linguistic style.

Thus, I will indicate how teenagers frequently stylised Antwerp dialect as a wayof speaking that was clearly associated with white others, very often to producemock-criticism of and indignation at classmates’ behaviour. Consequently, I willcompare this to how these same teenagers stylised the dialect in synchronywith their own voice and self-presentation when they produced jocular and less-jocular abuse, underlined assertiveness and distanced themselves from recent,linguistically incompetent, arrivals. The paper argues that this apparent paradoxcan be explained if we take into account the value of Antwerp dialect as a toolfor positioning oneself in relation to ideologies of class stratification and to localhierarchies of nativeness vs. non-nativeness.

I shall, in the following pages, first describe the ethnographic context where Iconstituted my data, followed by an overview of students’ linguistic repertoiresand by a discussion of the methodology I have used and the prominence ofstylisation in my analytical toolbox. Consequently, I will briefly discuss whatsocial indexicality Antwerp dialect had for my informants before going into ananalysis of interactional practices.

2. DATA CONSTITUTION AND ETHNOGRAPHIC CONTEXT

The data I draw on result from two and a half years of fieldwork in a secondaryschool around the turn of the century (May 1999 – April 2002) in Antwerp –a city located in the north of Belgium in the region of Flanders.2 Like manyother western European cities, Antwerp has, since the 1950s and 60s, beencharacterised by the large-scale immigration of low-skilled labour, notably fromMorocco and Turkey. These immigration waves have had a significant impact oninner-city boroughs where housing prices were low enough at the time to acquireimmigrant workers and their families. These changes have also brought aboutmuch racial hostility. Antwerp, as a city, stands out as a centre of such hostility.From the early 1990s onwards, the extreme rightist party Vlaams Blok (‘FlemishBloc’)3 has gloriously won election after election, and was at its peak (between2000 and 2004) supported by almost a third of the Antwerpian electorate.Recent elections have somewhat dented its appeal, but public discourse nowstrongly associates ethnic minorities with religious fundamentalism, anti-social

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STRANGE BEDFELLOWS 495

behaviour and linguistic deficiency, while many of Vlaams Blok’s major concernshave been slowly but surely adopted by other parties across the political spectrum.There is a consensus that ‘allochthons’ (the most recent politically-correct termfor immigrants and their Belgian-born children and even grandchildren) ‘shouldintegrate themselves into Flemish society’ if they seek to enjoy Flemish welfare,and that apart from ‘sharing our norms and values’ (e.g. avoiding headscarvesin public) this should be first and foremost achieved through ‘knowledge ofthe language’, viz., Dutch. Current demographic evolutions have only added tocalls that Dutch be acquired as a prerequisite for inclusion. All in all, though,increasing knowledge of Dutch has not prevented ethnic minorities’ effectiveintegration into disadvantageous socio-economic positions.

Ironically enough, Flemings have quite an ambivalent relation to the Dutchlanguage themselves and traditionally accuse each other of abusing it. Thisresults from a history in which Flemings fought for linguistic rights in Belgiumin the 19th and 20th centuries, but in the process did not intend to get a StandardFlemish but a Standard Dutch (as it was used in the Netherlands) accepted as anofficial language alongside French in Belgium (cf. Hermans, Vos and Wils 1992).Yet, given that Flemings hardly mastered Standard Dutch, they suddenly becamelinguistically disadvantaged students of their ‘own’ language. An extremelinguistic standardisation process took effect, especially after the Second WorldWar, in which schools and grassroots organisations set up ‘Standard DutchActions’, at times comprising whole weeks of speaking contests, awarenesscampaigns, dictations and quizzes. The public broadcasting corporation investedin prime-time language advice on radio and television (‘don’t say X, sayY’), while nation-wide broadsheets included language instruction columns (cf.Vandenbussche 2010). And, even if from the 1980s onwards explicit advice lostmuch of its popularity, decades of intense standardisation have led to massivedialect loss and to an omnipresent hierarchy of varieties in Flanders that pervadesthe home, school and workplace. Unsurprisingly, Flemish educational policyhas always heavily focused on Standard Dutch and on eradicating dialect useto ‘save’ children from language discrimination. It has recently stepped up itsefforts again in this regard in view of the rising number of non-Dutch speakingpupils in Flemish schools, with much public approval.

The importance of race relations and Standard Dutch was also clear at theschool (henceforth City School) where I carried out my research. Thus, theCity School had an explicitly multicultural and anti-racist policy, but it wasexplicitly pro Standard Dutch. Moreover, because of the high number of other-language speakers in the two classes I observed, special rules were drawn upthat prohibited ‘the use of dialects’, and ‘certainly the use of foreign languagesthat only a small group can understand’ – although not all teachers insistedon monolingual language use, and use of dialect features was only explicitlycorrected by the Dutch teacher and his history colleague. Accordingly, allstudents were well aware of which linguistic variety was expected at school.In tune with the City School’s multicultural ethos, relations between staff (all


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white) and students were generally amicable, although the two classes I visitedwere known for being difficult to handle. In spite of their similar working-classbackgrounds, inter-ethnic relations between students were somewhat frosty:students with migration histories took up centre stage in class and occupiednearly all discursive space; white students usually sat silently together in the frontof the class, trying to avoid being taken the mickey out of (which they often were).Apart from this, racism was often explicitly topicalised. Non-white studentsrecounted stories of getting excluded from night clubs, receiving humiliatingtreatment from the police or at other schools, at the same time as they oftenbrought racism self-mockingly into the daily proceedings. Thus, they wroteracist slurs next to a bad mark on a test they had received back and joked aboutasking for extra marks as a compensation for the teacher’s supposed racism;or they would provocatively shout ‘HEY RACISTS’ in the school corridor to seeif anybody would turn around and so ‘prove’ to be one. In line with macro-discourses on allochthons, most students with migration histories self-identifiedas ‘Moroccans’ and ‘Turks’ (depending on background) or ‘allochthons’, andthey identified white students as ‘Belgians’. White students themselves readilyaccepted ‘Turks’ and ‘Moroccans’ as denominators, but preferred ‘whites’ or‘Flemish’ for themselves.

3. LOCAL LINGUISTIC REPERTOIRES

Students’ linguistic repertoires were intensely varied. They contained:

• Various multilingual skills: all students possessed skills in European andnon-European languages, although these could vary from being fairlycomprehensive (home languages and school foreign languages such asFrench and English) to only a minimal, token knowledge (such as knowingswearwords in Arabic, Berber, Turkish or Polish).

• A routine Dutch vernacular: students usually interacted with each other ina local Dutch vernacular. Structurally and also indexically, this routineDutch vernacular must be characterised as neither Antwerp dialect norStandard Dutch but as hovering in between – in keeping with linguisticreports across Flanders of a quickly spreading ‘in-between language’ thatis neither dialectal nor standard but combines elements of the two (seeVandekerckhove 2009; see Table 1 for a comparison). However, theroutine Dutch of non-white students generally contained less dialectalfeatures than that of their white classmates, which is the reason whythe head of the school could be heard saying that ‘the allochthonsspeak better Dutch than the Belgians’, meaning less characteristicallydialectal. In addition, non-white students’ routine register containedregular code-switches (one-word interjections or longer sequences fromtheir home languages) and it was characterised by home-languageinterference at phonological and morphosyntactic level. Thus, it typicallyfeatured:



� a generalised definite article (de boek instead of regular neuter het boek[‘the book’]);

� strong instead of weak flexion of the adjective with a neuter noun (eengoede boek instead of een goed boek [‘a good book’]);

� incorrect flexion of demonstrative pronouns (deze boek instead of correctdit boek [‘this book’]);

� deletion of articles (moet gij gsm kopen? [‘do you want to buy cell-phone?’]); and

� home-language influenced phonology (with e.g. voiceless Dutch [X]often pronounced as uvular [χ ]) and prosody (with, for white speakers,extreme intonation patterns).

• Routine style shifts: there is observational and small-scale statisticalevidence that students routinely style shifted in Dutch (see Jaspers 2011for a small-scale variationist analysis), that is, they produced a greateramount of dialectal features in informal situations and less of these onformal occasions – although elements of both standard and dialect wereco-present in every utterance (cf. Rampton 2006: 252–261).

• Stylisations: students were able to switch into stylised versions of StandardDutch (Jaspers 2006), incompetent Dutch (Jaspers 2011), Antwerp dialect,and sometimes of broken English. Students were not code-switching inthese cases, but intensifying a range of features they identified as StandardDutch or Antwerp dialect. There was no systematically recurring setof features that got stylised. In addition, not everybody stylised in thesame way, nor did singular informants necessarily stylise with the samequality or intensity. Some of the home-language interference phenomenadiscussed above also influenced stylisations of Antwerp dialect, withgeneralisation of the dialectal article ne, as in ne maske instead of regulare(en) maske (‘a girl’), also in combination with strong flexion of theadjective, as in ne schone gat instead of regular e(en) schoon gat (‘a niceass’).

Despite these rich repertoires, all students struggled with academic Dutch.Students with a minority home language, especially, experienced difficultiesin writing and reading aloud – most of these students only started learningDutch at the age of five or six when they entered their primary school. Thisalso means that the latter students had not acquired Antwerp dialect featuresat home, but largely in peer-group processes in and outside school and throughpopular culture. White students grew up with Antwerp dialect features at home,but did not tend to play around with them, or at least not (when I was) at school.

Teachers’ repertoires, on the other hand, did not contain any Arabic, Berberor Turkish, neither was their routine Dutch characterised by these languagesat phonological or morphosyntactic level. Most teachers tuned up their Dutchwhen they started teaching, but tuned it down again and spoke more dialectallywhen they were in the staff room. Older teachers did this much more markedlythan younger teachers – i.e. the distance between older teachers’ classroom


498 JASPERS

Tab

le1

:So

me

feat

ure

sofA

ntw

erp

dial

ectc

ompa

red

toro

uti

ne

Du

tch

vern

acu

lara

nd

Stan

dard

Du

tch

(cf.

De

Sch

utt

er1

99

9;N

uyt

s1

98

9)

Lan

guag

eco

mpa

riso

n

An

twer

pdi

alec

tfea

ture

An

twer

pdi

alec

tR

outi

ne

Du

tch

vern

acu

lar

Stan

dard

Du

tch

Engl

ish

Ph

onet

ic:

Cen

tral

isin

gda

kan

nani

emee

rda

kan

nuni

emee

rda

tka

nnu

niet

mee

r‘t

hat

can

’tbe

tru

e’di

phth

ongs

(e.g

.[u

� ],[i

� ]or

[æ� ])

[da"

kan

anim

i� r][d

a"ka

nu

nim

e…r]

[dat"k

anu

ni…t

me…

r]on

noze

ler

[ɔ"n

u� zə

ler]

onno

zela

ar[ɔ"n

ɔzəl

ɑ…r]

dom

mer

ik‘id

iot’

geit

[Øæ

� t]ge

it[Ø

ε…t]

geit

[Øεi

t]‘g

oat’

Vel

aris

atio

nof

[n]i

nfin

alco

nso

nan

tcl

ust

er

doen

g[d

uN]

doen

[du

n]

doen

[du

n]

‘to

do’

T-d

elet

ion

da[d

a]/[

dæ]

da[d

a]da

t[dɑ

t]‘t

hat

’

H-d

ropp

ing

‘uis

[ɔ� s]

huis

[hœ…s

]hu

is[h

œys

]‘h

ouse

’

Mor

pho-

syn

tact

ic:

Encl

itic

pron

oun

sin

inve

rsio

nze

dde

["zed

ə]zi

jtgi

j["zε…tØ

ε…]o

rzi

jde

["zεd

ə]be

njij

["ben

jεi]

‘are

you

’

Pro

nou

ns

gulle

gulle

orju

llie

julli

e‘y

ou’(

2n

dpe

rs.p

lura

l)z’

hun

zij

zij

‘th

ey’

Dou

ble

neg

atio

nni

eman

dni

em

eer

niem

and

(nie

)m

eer

niem

and

mee

r‘n

obod

yn

om

ore’

Dim

inu

tive

son

-ke

zaks

keza

kske

orza

kje

zakj

e‘li

ttle

bag’



Dutch and staff room vernacular was much greater than that of their juniorcolleagues.

4. METHODOLOGY: LINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY

The data were analysed within a methodological frame now often called(socio)linguistic ethnography (cf. Creese 2008; Heller 1999; Rampton et al.2004), which combines methods and approaches from the ethnography ofcommunication (Hymes 1972), interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982)and micro-ethnography (Erickson 1996). Social-constructionist in their outlook,linguistic ethnographers hold that ‘language and social life are mutuallyshaping, and that close analysis of situated language use can provide bothfundamental and distinctive insights into the mechanisms and dynamics ofsocial and cultural production in everyday activity’ (Rampton et al. 2004: 2).There is an insistence, therefore, on interactional evidence in which participantspresuppose or articulate broader social categories, which often implies a focuson stylisations and other forms of meta-linguistic commentary alongside routinelinguistic interaction. Since stylisations take up a front seat in many linguisticethnographic analyses, I will briefly characterise them before I engage inanalysing the ones that are present in my data.

4.1 (Dialect) stylisation and routine language use

Stylisations have been described by sociolinguists as:

• ‘the knowing deployment of culturally familiar styles and identities thatare marked as deviating from those predictably associated with the currentspeaking context [and current speaker’s own style]’ (Coupland 2001: 345);

• the ‘intensification or exaggeration of a particular way of speaking forsymbolic and rhetorical effect’ (Rampton 2001: 85); or ‘small pieces ofsecondary representation inserted into the flow of practical activity –moments of social commentary on some aspect of the activities on hand’(Rampton 2006: 218); and as

• ‘implicit statements as to the social identities and ideologies associated with[the stylised variety]’ (Pujolar 2001: 36).

Stylisations are, in other words, verbal cartoons, eye-catching sketches oflinguistic material that are lifted out from their usual surroundings and insertedinto the current proceedings to suggest one is not speaking as oneself or aswould be expected. These ‘dramatizations’ (Pujolar 2001: 35) subsequentlyinvite others to mobilise their background knowledge of language and society towork out what representation of someone else’s voice is evoked, how it can bereconciled with current circumstances, and whether it is appropriate, funny, ornot (cf. Rampton 2006: 224–225; also see Coupland 2007: 146ff.). Stylisationscharacteristically function as a cue for others to infer that its producer sees the


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act or event that induces the stylisation as typical of the social characteristicsthat the stylisation evokes (what Goffman would describe as ‘reading acts assymptoms’ 1971: 97).

There has been a lot of sociolinguistic interest in stylisations during the lastdecade, fuelled by the realisation that explicit metalinguistic behaviour has beenunduly given the cold shoulder in variationist sociolinguistics, owing to thediscipline’s distrust of self-conscious speech and to its methodological preferencefor linguistic phenomena that are organised at the level of large-scale socialunits (cf. Cameron 1990: 65–66; Coupland 2007; Eckert 2000: 30; Schilling-Estes 1998). All the same, now that stylisations have become an establishedtopic, it is important that they are approached in intimate connection withspeakers’ non-stylised register, or that stylisations and routine registers are seenas communicating vessels rather than each other’s opposites (‘inauthentic’ vs.‘real’ language). This is a point that follows from the insight that stylised and non-stylised language only differ in terms of degree rather than category: whereasstylised language is easily understood as constructed for the sake of effect,non-stylised language needs to be viewed as equally constructed, only to scoremuch more mundane effects, or as constructed in a way that others will recogniseas predictable, expected, and so on (Coupland 2001: 348, 2007: 146; Jaspers2006: 134). If so, the analysis of stylisations can at least partially shed lighton the underlying principles of speakers’ non-stylised behaviour – assumingthat what speakers portray as theatrical and non-routine cannot be isolatedfrom, and is informative of, what they see and do to make sure they are seenas normal and inconspicuous. And, if we follow Agha’s assertion that ‘overt(publicly perceivable) evaluative behaviour . . . is a necessary condition on thesocial existence of [routine] registers’ (Agha 2004: 27, cited in Rampton 2011;also see Cameron 1995: 15–17), then stylisations may actually have to be seenas an integral part of the development, maintenance and change of routinevernaculars (Rampton 2011).

Any style and variety can in principle be stylised, but not all stylisations areequally interpretable for everybody. A crucial element is the ease with whichstylisations are recognised by an audience as associated with specific speakersand their activities and ideologies (cf. Coupland 2001: 350). This ease dependson the scope of the associations in question: certain styles may only locally,and temporarily, acquire social meanings that make them eligible for stylisation,such that they are only interpretable for a local, temporary audience. Other styles,however, may be part of wider spread meaning constellations that heighten thechance that their stylisation will be recognised as one. Dialects certainly belongto the latter group:

[i]n semiotic terms, dialect varieties are particularly well configured for stylisedperformance because they do generally constitute known repertoires with knownsocio-cultural and personal associations – such as high/low socio-economicstatus, urban/rural, sophisticated/unsophisticated, trustworthy/untrustworthy, ordynamic/dull, (Coupland 2001: 350)



where each time the opposite position is guaranteed by a standard variety –at least in western societies – characterised by linguistic standardisation (seeBauman and Briggs 2003; Bourdieu 1991; Pujolar 2001; Rampton 2006 fora similar point). These contrastive dimensions typically serve as a backdrop forquick character sketches in drama, film or literature where drawing on dialectfeatures is usually meant to flag a character’s position at the unattractive sideof each dimension (Culpeper 2001; Lippi-Green 1997; Meek 2006). At the sametime, these dimensions often pave the way for various kinds of transgression,where dialectal language is used to discredit or subvert formal, public or elevatedidentities (cf. Pujolar 2001: 128ff.).

Stylisations can be basically vari-directional or uni-directional (cf. Bakhtin1984; Chun 2009; Rampton 1995: 221–224). ‘Vari-directional double-voicing’involves stylisation of a voice or social figure that is sharply distinguishedfrom the styliser’s own voice and identity, and where the drift is oftendeauthentication, irony or suggesting reported speech (cf. Hill 1999). Instead,‘uni-directional double-voicing’ implies that the stylised voice is in synchronywith the utterer’s own voice and self-presentation, and that stylisers (hopeto) ‘benefit from their association with qualities stereotypically attributed tothe represented outgroup [voice]’ (Chun 2009: 21). Uni-directional double-voicing often provides a springboard for processes of dialect appropriation,styling processes where linguistic features one was not seen to own aregradually sedimenting in one’s speech. Appropriation marks the point wherestylisation spills over into more routine language use, or the moment atwhich audiences have become used to speakers’ selection of new resourcesas part of their regular register. Such appropriations may not always work,however – they may be criticised or curtailed, just as those whose styles areappropriated may criticise them or pull away from these attempts to complicateimitation or uptake by others (Chun 2009; Hill 1999; Jaspers 2008; Rampton1995).

Linguistic appropriation is in this paper taken to imply that the target issomehow attractive, or that adopters picture it as cool, hip, tough, ‘the futurelanguage’ (Rampton 1995 on Creole), often in relation to music scenes, street oryouth cultures – such as African American Vernacular English and its relationto hip hop (Bucholtz 1999; Cutler 1999). Such appropriation is not usuallyobserved with linguistic features speakers tend to perceive as ridiculous, uncoolor unattractive. Indeed, such features would be well qualified for producingvari-directional double-voicing. In this paper, however, I argue that suchappropriation is possible all the same. I present data where Antwerp dialectfeatures are used both for vari- and uni-directional double-voicing and I arguethat this can be explained by attending to the dialect’s allure for highlightingstratification processes and immigrant vs. non-immigrant distinctions. Before Ido so, it is necessary to point out what immediate social indexes Antwerp dialectconjured up for my informants when they discussed it in interviews.


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5. THE SOCIAL INDEXICALITY OF ANTWERP DIALECT

Many of the social meanings attached to Antwerp dialect were inspired byits position as a dialect opposed to Standard Dutch. So, in various interviewsAntwerp dialect was called ‘marginal’, ‘poor’, ‘farmer-like’; it was associatedwith coarsely complaining alcoholics and with factory workers who crudelydiscuss ‘serious subjects’, i.e. adult issues. It was also seen as belonging toolder people, ‘true Antwerpians that you couldn’t understand if they spokereal Antwerp dialect’, and this age was sometimes illustrated by imitatingthem with a slow, croaky or quavering voice. The dialect could invite mock-corrective comments (‘speak properly!’). And for non-white students the above-mentioned indexes were obvious correlates of antisocial white and racistbehaviour:

Example 1: That can’t be true (simplified transcription; bold = stylisations ofAntwerp dialect; other transcription conventions and information on translationconsiderations can be found in a note at the end of this article)4

Interview with Nordin, Mourad and Jamal. Nordin explains that Antwerp dialect isused by older people from Antwerp.

English translation Original version

Nordin: it’s mostly used against us by olderpeople from Antwerp, right?

meestal wordt da tegen ons gebruiktdoor ouwere mensen he vanAntwerpen, he?

JJ: how so? really? hoe da? Is da?Mourad: yes jaJJ: have you ever heard this? komde da tegen?Nordin: you see? no, before, when we were

playing football against somebody’shousefront or something like ‘HEYQUIT IT’ [laughs] you see? [laughs]

snapte? nee vroeger as wij aan’tvoetballen waren tegen iemand zijngevel of zo ‘HEI SCHTOPT ERMEE’[lacht] snapte? [lacht]

JJ: [laughs] [lacht]Mourad: or one like- in a documentary on the

Flemish Bloc likeof zo eentje in ne reportage van ’tVlaams Blok zo

Nordin: ‘HEY ASSHOLES’ ‘HEI KLOETZAKKEN’JJ: [laughs] [lacht]Nordin: you see, and then we imitate that

for fun rightsnapte, zo, en dan pakken wij datover voor de grap he

Jamal: ‘that can’t be true’ ‘da kan naa niemeer he’Mourad: or a documentary on the Flemish

Bloc, right Nordinof ne reportage van ‘t Vlaams Blokhe Nordin

Nordin: or uh ‘that can’t be true’ of eh ‘da kan na niemeer he’Mourad: a documentary on the Flemish Bloc,

an old lady like: ‘it’s a disgrace! and[.]’, you know?

ne reportage van ’t Vlaams Blok,zo’n oud madammeke: ‘da’sschandalig! en [.]’, kende da?



JJ: right ca vaNordin: and yeah, Antwerp how many people

have voted for the FlemishBloc?

en ja, Antwerpen hoeveel mensenhebben er gestemd op ’t VlaamsBlok?

Mourad: one out of three een op drieNordin: one out of three right? een op drie he?

Jamal: one out of four een op vierNordin: one out of three een op drieMourad: one out of three een op drieNordin: and those people are usually true

Antwerpians true Antwerpians withtheir language and everything right

en die mensen zijn meestal echteAntwerpenaren echteAntwerpenaren met hun taal enalles he

In another interview, Rafik and Nordin say they don’t know many whites outsideschool because they’re anti-social and reproachful, adding that ‘Belgians, if theyhave a bad life go like “your fault it’s the Moroccans again taking away ourjobs” this and that’. Also, ways of speaking could spark off such reproachful andracist comments, as Mourad illustrates:

look, especially as a Moroccan, if you start talking to Belgians with a languagelike pam pam then they’ll say then they’ll think ‘man, this wog doesn’tknow any Dutch’ but, but when you’re like us then- then they’ll think‘bloody hell! they speak better Dutch than us damn it how’s this possible?’[laughter].

So clearly, Antwerp dialect reeks of racism: non-white students in my studyassociate it with white, angry, extreme-rightist personas, who call names atchildren infringing on their territory and indignantly bemoan that others’behaviour (linguistic or otherwise) is not tolerable or possible anymore. Thiswould appear to make it off limits for any use beyond messing about andflagging inauthenticity. And, indeed, non-white students said that ‘if there’s anyserious business between us we don’t use [Antwerp dialect]’, ‘it’s only for doingridiculous, for joking around’. Or, if anybody tended to use it without visiblescare-quotes, one student made it clear that he would simply ‘imitate them tomake them look ridiculous, you see? [. . .] so that they calm down’ and ‘talknormal’ again. In sum, Antwerp dialect is not only marginalised in public andeducational discourse, but it is also pejorated by an influential group of studentsin my data as easily evoking the frame of racism or interethnic animosity. Giventhat Antwerp dialect was quite unattractive and connotationally ‘dirty’, I willshow in the next paragraphs that it was highly recruitable for ‘vari-directional’stylisation and messing about, mostly for constructing passionate mockindignation and criticism.


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6. INTERACTIONAL PRACTICES

This paper is based on 85 examples of dialect stylisation, all produced bystudents with a (Moroccan) migration history.5 Identifying stylisations is never ablack-and-white issue, and what sounds stylised for the ethnographer-analystmay be cryptic for the outsider. In keeping with others, therefore, I have basedmy decisions on a number of criteria.6 To be sure, for a number of the examplesin my data it was difficult to see what extra meaning a sudden switch to Antwerpdialect added to the ongoing proceedings, and it probably makes most sense todefine these voice colourings as ‘sound play’. There were echoes, too, of the oldvoices mentioned in the interviews, when Antwerp dialect was stylised to imitatepersonas making reference to ‘the old days’. But these imitations were part of anarrative and could not be seen to comment on the activities on hand. In oneor two cases, non-white students produced a ‘say for’ (Goffman 1981: 150) tomock their white classmates, that is, they stylised Antwerp dialect and suggestedthe utterance was produced by their classmate. There is one example in my fieldnotes where Dennis is mock-encouraged in drama class (he was not particularlywell-liked) as he proceeds to get on the stage, first with ‘Dennis you can do itman!’, and then immediately in Antwerp dialect ‘whoa! I’ve got chains with me’,referring to Dennis’s chain wallet.

6.1 Passionate mock indignation and criticism

In many more cases though, Antwerp dialect underlined passionate indignationabout real or perceived improprieties in the situation at hand. For a while atleast, the complaint ‘that (just) can’t be true’ (see also Example 1) served asa running gag, and whenever it was produced, it was responded to with achorus of approving echoes and slowly shaking heads, leaving others to find outwhatever was commented on – often it didn’t seem to refer to any infraction atall. In other examples the referent was unambiguous, as when Mourad mock-complained ‘I’ve told you didn’t I mate, those girls of today’ when he felt somegirls nearby were chatting too loudly while he was being interviewed: he wastemporarily putting on and using linguistic material that everybody knew didn’tbelong to his ‘real’ voice but which allowed him to be ironic and at the sametime to address some girls uninvited. A similar use of Antwerp dialect wasmade to produce mock criticism. On one occasion, Nordin, who was not exactlyuninterested in girls, loudly held Johan accountable for kissing his girlfriend onthe playground (‘HEY PERVERT! DO YOU HAVE TO DO THIS EVERYWHERE?’)and on another, Karim warned Driss to ‘TAKE A BREATH MAN, HEY, STAYOFF THOSE CIGARETTES’ after Driss suddenly choked and had a coughingfit (but was not smoking). Typically, on these and on other occasions, therewere no remedies provided (Johan grinningly replied ‘yes’ to Nordin’s rhetoricalquestion; the girls were amused by Mourad’s mock complaint). So, other thanimputing the social characteristics indexed by the stylised variety to thosewho are seen to commit the transgression (cf. Rampton 1995: 142–148),



stylisations that critically homed in on a fake impropriety (kissing, coughing,chatting) initiated interaction and often shared laughter between criticiser andcriticised.

Obviously, it can be fun seeing others trying to relate a bombastic reproachto their current circumstances and witnessing their temporary puzzlementbefore they realise it was all meant in jest. But it is also difficult to overlookthat indignant and critical voices are typical of public statements at schools,where many students are singled out for such addresses. And in a number ofcases, mock-critical stylisations were indeed oriented to school business and tooccasions when institutional control, classroom order, discipline and evaluationwere at issue. Here, improprieties were less fictive and criticism was almostalways formulated within rather than outside class. Accordingly, I found suchstylisations as ‘now you’ve gone too far’, ‘YOU’RE TOO LATE’, and ‘that was thelast time’, ‘last chance mate’, a pseudo-permission such as ‘go ahead, write onthe table’ or a pseudo-request like ‘are we being funny again?’, were all directedto classmates who had in fact been reproached already, who had indeed enteredthe class late, were writing something on the table, or were busy trying to befunny.

Teachers at the City School didn’t speak Antwerp dialect in class or in corridors,however. In principle, therefore, it would be difficult to claim that teacher voicesare imitated rather than the anti-social, white and old voices students hadencountered outside school (cf. Example 1). But in the next two examples we cansee how teacher comments are actually turned into Antwerp dialect voices:

Example 2: Still here?At the start of an interview with Imran, Faisal and Jamal, Imran asks why Mourad,Brahim and Yassin are still standing in the room. A couple of minutes earlier, thelatter three had entered the room uninvited, trying to escape a French test in theupcoming class.


1 Imran: [quietly:] didn’t you have to go to class? 1 [stil:] moeste gulle nie naar de klas?2 ?: [laughs] 2 [lacht]3 Jamal: hey are you guys still here or what? = 3 hei zitte gulle hier naa nog of wa? =

4 Faisal: = yeah are you guys still here or what? 4 = ja zitte gulle hier naa nog of wa?

5 Mourad: [slightly irritated:] yea-ah. 5 [licht geergerd:] ja-a.6 Faisal: after all these years of practise come on 6 na al die jaren praktijk seg7 JJ: | I do-

don’t want7 | ik wil- ik wil

ulle nie8 to chase you off but it’s going to help us 8 wegjagen maar da ga een bitje zorgen

da we9 concentrate a bit more uh 9 wa geconcentreerder eh


506 JASPERS

Imran’s question in line 1 orients to a virtual conflict: the interview cannot reallystart if Mourad, Brahim and Yassin are also in the room but not participating.Imran therefore enquires if the latter three shouldn’t be in (French) class,indirectly allowing them to explain their presence, make an apology or moveon, but he sees his question recycled and stylised into Antwerp dialect by Jamal(line 3) and recompleted by Faisal (line 4). Jamal and Faisal’s questions are lesstimid than Imran’s original one: they’re slightly louder than the question inline 1, there is a stress on nog (‘still’) that makes the question express impatience,and the question is also much more dialectal, and thus less polite. So, whereImran’s question still strategically exploited the ambiguity of an inquiry thata good listener could interpret as a polite hint, Jamal and Faisal’s questionsare outspoken mock-reproaches, not unlike the ones discussed above. Even ifMourad’s reply in line 5 intimates slight irritation, Faisal emphasises the mockcharacter of his earlier reproach by reconstructing it as a teacher’s complaintin line 6 – there, he copies the intonation and the hardly dialectal speech styleof Mr H, the technology teacher,7 and propositionally recycles his reproach inline 4 into a teacher’s complaint about the fact that they as students are ‘still here’(i.e. at school) in spite of ‘all these years of practise’ (i.e. they keep failing theirexams despite having had years of electro-mechanics practicals). Hence, whatFaisal does is make it seem as if his stylised question in line 4 and his imitationof Mr H in lines 6 are both uttered by Mr H, in this way bringing together twodifferent voices in the same interactional slot. Something similar can be seenin the next example, where a sharp and repeated reproach in stylised Antwerpdialect is based on a preceding, but non-dialectal, reprimand from the Englishteacher, Ms M.

Example 3a: ADNAN!In English class, Ms M is giving a quiz – she reads a number of statements onthe British which the class has to point out as true or false. The answers arenot formally evaluated. Adnan is reprimanded very loudly right after statement 11(line 9), which unleashes hilarity with the rest of the class. Adnan is a pseudonym,and is left untranscribed.


1 Ms M: eleven [.] THE BRITISH SPEAK 1 eleven [.] THE BRITISH SPEAK2 ONLY ENGLISH 2 ONLY ENGLISH3 Adnan: | ( ) 3 | ( )4 Imran: ( ) 4 ( )5 Ms M: AND EXPECT 5 AND EXPECT6 Adnan: | ( ) 6 | ( )7 Ms M: EVERYONE ELSE TO

UNDERSTAND THEM7 EVERYONE ELSE TO

UNDERSTAND THEM8 ?: miss ( ) 8 mevrouw ( )9 Ms M: | ADNAN!! = 9 | ADNAN!! =



10 Nordin: = [LAUGHS] 10 = [LACHT]11 [WHOLE CLASS LAUGHS,

CHEERS AND YELLS] [5.0]11 [HELE KLAS LACHT, JOELT

EN GILT] [5.0]12 ?: ( ) 12 ( )13 Imran: ( ) 13 ( )14 [laughter] 14 [gelach]15 Nordin: ADNAN 15 ADNAN16 ?: ( ) 16 ( )17 ? [laughter] 17 [gelach]18 Nordin: [laughs] ADNAN [laughs] 18 [lacht] ADNAN [lacht]19 ? SHUSH 19 SSHSHT20 Faisal: [laughs] 20 [lacht]21 Ms M: can we perhaps have another

try at21 kunnen we misschien nog een

poging wagen om nog22 Jamal: [Arabic?] [laughter] 22 [Arabisch?] [gelach]23 Mourad: can you repeat this [.] number

eleven ( )23 herhaalt da eens [.] nummer

elf ( )24 Nordin: ADNANG 24 ADNANG25 Ms M: eleven [..] 25 eleven [..]26 Jamal: miss these are kids I’m going to

leave this26 mevrouw da zijn kinderen ‘k gaan

hier weg van27 school 27 dees school28 Ms M: [hushed:] Nordin 28 [zacht:] Nordin29 Imran: [laughs] 29 [lacht]30 Ms M: that’s a good idea perhaps 30 da’s misschien een goe gedacht31 Adnan: | hey come on

guys31 |he

mannen komaan

Ms M has been formulating quiz questions for a while, but is having muchdifficulty making herself understood. Pupils are talking all the time, shouting avague ‘yes’ or ‘no’, everybody’s attention is scattered in many directions, untilMs M loses her temper in line 9 and loudly reprimands Adnan (which she haddone a couple of times before). When she does this, there is a rare moment offocused attention as the whole class starts laughing, cheering and yelling atthe sight of Ms M’s loss of control. While Ms M’s named address (‘ADNAN!’) inline 9 was not dialectal, Nordin rephrases this name in Antwerp dialect in lines15, 18 and 24, step by step adding another typical feature of Antwerp dialect(cf. Table 1). Thus, Nordin first reproduces Adnan’s original name in line 15with a strong Antwerp [æ] instead of routine [a]; in line 18 he then adds tothis by dropping the ‘h’ in front of Adnan’s original name, and he consequentlyelaborates this stylisation in line 24 by now changing the [n] at the end ofAdnan’s original name into an [N]. A bit later, just before quiz question 14, we findthis:


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Example 3b: ADNAN! (less than two minutes after the previous example)


1 Youssef: ( ) 1 ( )2 Nordin: ADNAN 2 ADNAN3 Ms M: AND FOURTEEN 3 AND FOURTEEN4 Youssef: ( [Arabic?]) 4 ( [Arabisch?])5 Nordin: hey just turn

around mate [.] Adnan5 hei draaidaaw is oem joeng [.] Adnan

[ei dr�idɐu iz’um iuN]6 Ms M: | fourteen 6 | fourteen

In line 2 Nordin produces Adnan’s original name again with very clear Antwerp[æ]-vowels and a glottal stop up front, and in line 5 we find a typical teachercommand (‘turn around’) in stylised Antwerp dialect: Nordin now uses abilabial [ ], preceded by a [ɐu]-diphthong which characteristically precedes aw-consonant at word-end in Antwerp dialect (De Schutter 1999; Nuyts 1989).Thus, Nordin repeatedly reproduces a teacher reproach, makes it much moredialectal than the original utterance (as Faisal did in Example 2), and generallyshapes it into an enjoyable object (at least to himself) which he even embellishesby inventing a new reproach in line 5 that was not preceded by an explicit teachercommand (at least not hearably so).

How should we interpret this bringing together of different voices into thesame interactional slot? Clearly, there is a similarity in that the extramuralvoices mentioned in interview reports (section 5) and teachers’ comments areboth explicitly critical and somewhat repressive, and by implicitly comparingthese voices and comments with each other students appear to be pulling thesting out of what teachers (could) say to them. It could be argued in addition,given that Antwerp dialect is related to white angriness and indignation, thatNordin is portraying Ms M as an old racist and suggests that institutionalrelations are reproductive of interethnic ones. Even if such an interpretationcannot be ruled out entirely, there are a couple of indications that make it lessplausible:

• Relations between students and teachers were generally congenial, and ifconflicts arose, they never (to my knowledge) related to ethnic relations.In fact, even if some teachers privately expressed less than benign opinionson certain ethnic minorities, as a teacher they were sometimes preferredover those who saw themselves as supportive of multiculturalism.

• Teacher-like stylisations of Antwerp dialect were not necessarily directedagainst teachers and sometimes actually supported the organisation ofclassroom conduct (cf. Rampton 2006: 280–283): at one point, whenthe electricity teacher was ineffectively trying to address the whole classat the start of class, Nordin succeeded in doing just that by saying‘when the grown-ups are talking, the kids have to shut up’. The



utterance caused collective laughter, but it also paved the way for theteacher’s first successful public turn, marking the real beginning of theclass.

• Many mock-critical stylisations were produced at transitional momentswhere they underlined the changing interaction order or highlightedan increasing asymmetry or emerging hierarchy between students andauthority figures on moments such as:

� getting the students under the teacher’s control at the start of class(‘when the grown-ups are talking . . .’, ‘are we being funny again?’);

� entering the classroom (‘go ahead, write on the table’);� being reprimanded (Example 3);� being in a room where one shouldn’t be right before class (Example 2);� being identified as not meeting academic expectations (Example 2); or� patronising somebody (‘yes love yes love say it’, said to a classmate).

It is not irrelevant to mention, however, that Nordin had been publiclyreproached earlier on by Ms M when he came in 10 minutes late – mock-innocently humming a song – and that the reproach did not go down wellwith Nordin. He felt slighted, argued he had had business to take care of, andeventually sat down muttering he was not an eight-year-old anymore. Knowingthis, Nordin’s parodic recycling of Ms M’s reprimand can be interpreted as a laterepartee or symbolic revenge for what happened earlier, with each stylisationhelping him to savour the moment of his teacher’s temporary loss of authority.This certainly makes Nordin’s stylisations less innocently mock-critical thanother examples.

Still, even if more genuine, Nordin still focuses on institutional relationsmuch more than interethnic ones (he enjoys his teacher’s loss of authority,not her failure to live up to the school’s multicultural ethos). Just as in Example2, therefore, and taking into account the considerations above, the sardonichumour of these stylisations may be said to reside in contrasting a typical ‘high’teacher voice (non-dialectal, authoritative, in control, rational) with a ‘low’ one(dialectal, marginal, out of control, emotional), thus undermining the authorityand effectiveness of the voiced criticism.8

While the racist indexicality of Antwerp dialect mentioned in section 5 doesnot seem to play a prominent role in these stylisations, other indexes (the highemotions, the criticism, the coarseness) are certainly relevant. And it is thecombination of the latter indexical meanings with the focus on institutionalrelations that guaranteed a lot of fun. After all, many mock-critical commentswere relevant in view of maintaining classroom order and, thus, difficult todo away with as entirely inappropriate by teachers. At the same time, thesecomments were produced by non-legitimate speakers (viz., students rather thanteachers), in a non-school variety (a dialect rather than Standard Dutch), andwith a voice volume and a level of emotion that seriously went beyond the much


510 JASPERS

more subdued role students are ideally supposed to play at school. The enjoymentresulting from this may well have inspired the mock indignant and emotionalvoices outside classroom walls (cf. ‘those girls of today’).

To sum up the argument so far:

• interview reports undeniably paint Antwerp dialect as an unattractive varietyfor non-white students (‘marginal’, ‘anti-social’, ‘racist’);

• in interaction, the dialect was indeed stylised by non-white students assomeone else’s voice;

• on a few occasions, this voice belonged to white classmates;• but on many more other occasions it appeared to belong to an institutional

other, when stylisations oriented to issues of transgression and improprietyand helped parody teacher reprimands, either just before or just aftermoments when hierarchical relations tensed up (right before having toconcentrate again at the start of class, before starting up a researcher-ledinterview, or immediately following a teacher-student conflict);

• the use of Antwerp dialect on these institutional occasions may have inspiredmock-critical stylisations outside class (‘those girls of today’).

Yet in spite of its undeniable ‘other’ qualities, paradoxically enough in manyadditional examples Antwerp dialect was ‘uni-directionally double-voiced’, thatis, it was stylised by these same students in synchrony with their own voiceand self-presentation, and it is to a discussion of these examples I now wish toturn.

7. ANTWERP DIALECT FOR THE EXPRESSION OF SELF

In the following examples, stylisations of Antwerp dialect gradually becomeharder to distinguish from speakers’ ordinary, authentic ways of speaking, andwhatever criticism or abuse is formulated tends to be more in relation to theactual impropriety, act or event that caused it. I will in turn discuss: largelyjocular abuse; less jocular abuse; assertive retorts; and the suggestion of localorigin.

7.1 Jocular abuse

Apart from stylisations of Antwerp dialect in a couple of ‘sounding’ or ‘woofing’sessions (Heller 1999: 223; Labov 1972: 297; Rampton 1995: 172), equippingsomebody with a collar microphone typically led to quite a few (mostly jocular)reactions when I had walked away and students had the microphone tothemselves: ‘GRASSER! Do you know what we do with grassers? We just taketheir clothes off in the middle of the playground mate’; ‘I’m going to fuck youmate’; ‘Hey look Jasper if you don’t give me a 10 out of 10, I’ll fuck yourmother’; ‘you’ve been to the cops, I know where you live man, I’ll just runyou over’; ‘Jurgen mate, in Prague mate, I’ll put my dick into your nose mate’;



etc. It was not always clear whether stylisations addressed their microphone-wearing classmate or myself; and even if they were not all unambiguouslymock, there was usually a lot of hilarity and peer-to-peer abuse too when theywere produced, and they generally disappeared when everyone had becomeused to the presence of a microphone or forgot about it due to the lesson focus.Obviously, many of these threats are related to penetration, taking off clothesor being otherwise exposed, which may not be entirely inappropriate giventhe microphone-sporting classmate’s or my own intrusion into their personalterritory now that everything they said was being recorded. All in all though,the general mood in these examples is jocular, in the sense that no remedieswere expected nor given. In the next example we find Faisal in a less jocularmood.

7.2 Less jocular abuse

Example 4: I’m fed upFeedback interview with Faisal, Imran and Jamal. Faisal would like the interviewto last two class hours, but I only have permission to keep him away from class forone hour. Faisal called me ‘Yuri’ during the whole interview.


1 JJ: [moves hand to button 1 [gaat met hand naar de knop2 to fast forward the tape] 2 om tape verder te spoelen]3 Faisal: NONONONO 3 NEENEENEENEE4 JJ: I’m going to fast forward a bit 4 ik ga een beetje verderspoelen.5 Faisal: nono just a sec just a sec just a

sec5 neenee momentje momentje

momentje6 Imran: | ( ) 6 | ( )7 JJ: yehyeh but it’s going to be a bit

long now so uh7 jaja maar ’t gaat efkes lang zijn

dus eh8 Faisal: oh okay that’s cool [..] 8 ha ca va da’s goe [..]9 but we’ve got two hours anyway 9 maar wij hebben toch twee

urekes10 so that’s not a problem 10 dus da kan geen kwaad11 JJ: yeah [.] yeah that depends 11 jaa [.] ja dat hangt ervan af12 Faisal: yehyehyehyehyehyeh no that’s

no prob-12 jajajajajaja nee da ga allem-

13 if you fix it we’re allowed youknow

13 agij da regelt mogen wij da ze

14 Imran: |two hours 14 |twee urekes15 do you need (us again) after the

break?15 hebt gij na de speeltijd (ons nog)

nodig?16 Faisal: yeah here after the break again a

bit uh [..]16 ja hier na de speeltijd efkes terug

eh [..]


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17 Yuri you can fix it can’t you Yuri 17 Joeri gij kunt da wel regelen heJoeri

18 JJ: yeh well I’m notso sure

18 ja da weet ik nietzo goe

19 Faisal: | come on Yu- I’m fe- 19 | komaan Joe- g’hangt m’n voe-[k�man iu… γaNt m�n "vu…]

20 JJ: | but you’ve 20 | maar ge21 also got to try a bit to say some

good [.]21 moet ook een bitje proberen om

ook wa goeie [.]22 stuff uh [.] and not uh 22 dinges eh [.] te zeggen he en nie

eh23 Jamal: yeah coz uh 23 ja want eh24 Imran: | of course ( ) 24 | ah ja ( )25 Faisal: | OKAY I’M

GOING TO SAY25 | OKEE ‘K GA IETS

GOE26 SOMETHING GOOD WAIT

WAIT I’m going to-26 ZEGGEN WACHT WACHT ik ga

iets-

When, in line 9, Faisal says ‘we’ve got two hours anyway’, he confronts mewith a fait accompli (no doubt in order to escape an extra lesson), suggesting thatthey have permission for two interview hours when in fact I had only asked forone. When I express doubts about this (line 11), Faisal points out that I am verycapable of fixing them up with an extra hour (lines 12–13 and 17). And whileI again object to that, Faisal puts in a stylised complaint (‘come on Yu- I’m fe-’,short for ‘come on Yuri, I’m fed up with you’, in Dutch komaan Joeri, g’hangtm’n voeten uit) that marks the point at which our virtual misunderstandingturns into a disagreement or conflict. As Goffman (1981) argues, such occasionsoften invite a change in footing that frequently involves a code-switch or style-shift, as is also the case here, in line 19, where there is a noticeable shift tomore intense use of Antwerp dialect features, even if only briefly. This stylisedcomplaint subsequently gets interrupted midway by my own request in lines 20–21 that Faisal should attempt to ‘say some good stuff’ (he hadn’t been particularlyhelpful earlier on in the interview). Clearly, an utterance as ‘I’m fed up with you’is quite similar to the complaints and indignant voices discussed above. But hereit would be hard to point at a dramatic voice or any other scare quoting action topoint at the utterance’s theatrical character. Faisal’s classmates are similarly notlaughing, and on the contrary seem to confirm my request for cooperation (lines23–24). Faisal is clearly not expressing his irritation with a fake improprietybut with a genuine obstacle to his desire for another free hour. Consequently inthis example, there seems to be a much smaller gap between self and voice, oran ‘overlap of symbolic evocation and personal concern’ (Rampton 1995: 123)that somewhat blurs the boundary between outgroup code and personal style.This boundary becomes even vaguer in the following example, where Antwerpdialect is used in protest against being dressed down.



7.3 Assertiveness

Example 5: Not a small childAt the end of the English lesson (see Example 3 above), Ms M calls Nordin asideto repeat that he will not be allowed in class again if he’s late, and once more thisgives rise to a discussion.


1 Ms M: what I told you an hour ago [.] 1 wat ik daarstraks gezegd heb [.]2 I mean that you know 2 da meen ik wel he3 Nordin: what? 3 wa?4 Ms M: next time you won’t be allowed

in class4 volgende keer kom jij nie na(ar)

de les5 Nordin: | NONO 5 | NEENEE6 hey MISS I COME IN HERE [1.0] 6 he meVROUW IK KOM HIER

BINNEN [1.0]7 I’m not allowed to come in

anymore or what?7 ik mag hier nie meer

binnen of wa?8 Ms M: | I’m only saying 8 | ik zeg maar9 that I mean it and next time 9 gewoon dat ik het meen en

volgende10 you’re together = 10 keer ben je samen =11 Nordin: | come on miss look 11 | allee mevrouw zie12 Ms M: = with the rest of the group

[.] okay?12 = met de rest in de klas

[.] ja?13 Nordin: |so WHAT? [.] 13 |en DAN? [.]14 if anybody else came late uh 14 als er iemand anders nu te laat

komt euh15 you’d be saying just

nothing15 dan zoude gewoon

niks zeggen [γe�u�n]16 Ms M: | uh Nordin [.] 16 | euh Nordin [.]17 next time you’re on time that’s

this Friday17 de volgende keer ben je op tijd

da’s de vrijdag18 [.] okay? 18 [.] ja?19 [2.0] 19 [2.0]20 Nordin: shit [.] I’m not a small child

anymore20 [t�z…] [.] ‘k zen kik geen klein

kind niemeer ze[γen kl æ�n kint]

21 [2.0] 21 [2.0]22 [Nordin walks out, JJ stays in

class]22 [Nordin loopt naar buiten, JJ

blijft in de klas]23 Nordin: and now talking behind the

back23 en nu achter de rug roddelen

When Ms M refers to her earlier reproach at the start of the lesson, Nordinindicates he doesn’t get the point, and this introduces an interactional conflict inwhich Nordin interrupts Ms M several times (lines 5, 11 and 13) and so precludes


514 JASPERS

the formulation of the reproach and the production of a deferent ‘place for notalking’ (Macbeth 1991) after it is formulated (also see Ms M’s interruptionsof Nordin’s rebuttals in lines 8 and 16). When, in lines 16–18, Ms M finallymanages to finish, Nordin surrenders and produces a silence which indicates heaccepts the reproach. But as Ms M turns away and talks to somebody else, heproduces an afterburn (Goffman 1971: 152–153, 1981: 93; Rampton 1995:123) to display his resilience or to compensate for his recent face loss after beingdressed down. There is a clear Antwerp dialect feature present in what Nordinsays in line 20 in that he uses a characteristic Antwerp diphthong that is notpart of his routine style (viz. [æ�]), and there is another clear example of thisin line 15 (where he uses an Antwerpian [u�]). The origin of other items isless easily determined: in line 20 Nordin uses a short [e] instead of standard[e…] in geen [‘not a’] and a sharp Antwerp [i] in kind [‘child’], but these featuresalso frequently appeared in their routine register. Thus, if we can call Nordin’suse of conspicuous Antwerp features a stylisation, it is much more woven intohis ordinary speech style. As mentioned above, Antwerp dialect got stylised ontransitional moments and when hierarchical relations became more prominent,and Nordin’s stylisations seem to contribute to that. But, rather than producinga conspicuous performance in a voice that was (to be recognised as) distant to hisown, Nordin is genuinely non-compliant vis-a-vis an institutional authority anduses features of Antwerp dialect to lend weight to what he says, to the extent thatit becomes difficult to distinguish between what is stylised and what is not. Eventhough not all students used Antwerp dialect in this way, in this and a numberof other cases it looks as though Antwerp dialect ceases to be a socially colourfulobject, but instead gets ‘adopted . . . in the enunciation of [one’s] own socialidentit[y]’ (Rampton 1995: 223). A similar case of adoption appears to occur inthe next example, where Antwerp dialect features are recruited to differentiatethe speaker from linguistically incompetent, recently arrived co-ethnics:

7.4 Vernacular competence

Example 6: Bang some more whores (simplified transcription; italics = BrokenDutch; bold = Antwerp influences)Interview with Mourad, Nordin, Faisal and Jamal. JJ asks why playful incompetentDutch is called ‘Illegal’.

English translation Original version1 JJ: why [.] why is it called that? 1 waarom [.] waarom heet da zo?2 Jamal: that’s accent, right sir 2 da’s accent he meneer3 JJ: whose accent? 3 accent van wie?4 Faisal: take for example take for example

there comes a4 pakt bijvoorbeeld pakt bijvoorbeeld

der komt nen-5 take for example eh [.] let’s say a

refugee5 pakt bijvoorbeeld he [.] ‘k zal

zeggen ne vluchteling



6 from Morocco [.] who comes inhere [.]

6 van Marokko [.] die komt hierbinnen [.]

7 who’s here for maybe a year [.]or a couple of

7 die’s hier misschien een jaar [.]of een paar

8 months and he wants [.] toexplain something

8 maanden en die wilt [.] ietsuitleggen he

9 right, but we don’t understandhim so what does

9 maar wij begrijpen die nie duswa begint die [.]

10 he start [.] he wants to speaksome Dutch [.]

10 wilt zo’n bitje Nederlands [.]Arabisch praten dus

11 Arabic so he says: [slowly:]uuuh I want like this to

11 die zegt zo: [traag:] eeeh ik wilzo naar gemeente

12 go town hall 12 gaan13 Jamal: [laughs] 13 [lacht]14 Faisal: uh town hall for for uh [ rak] [.]

[ rak] that’s14 eh gemeente voor voor eh [ rak]

[.] [ rak] is15 documents [.] you know

th-that’s Illegal coz why?15 papieren [.] weete d-da’s

illegaals want waarom?16 that’s an illegal who comes in

from outside16 da’s nen illegaal die komt van

buiten naar binnen17 [.] 17 [.]18 Mourad: an ‘allochthon’ 18 een allochtoon19 Nordin: and a new language sir you can

never19 en een nieuwe taal meneer ge

kunt nooit van in ’t20 conjugate right from the start 20 begin vervoegen21 Faisal: oh yeh [.] it’s hard to imagine

that he comes in all21 ah ja [.] da kan moeilijk zijn dat

die ineens22 at once like [hits the table, talks

faster]22 binnenkomt van [klapt op tafel,

spreekt sneller]23 hey guys [.] could you like

show me the town23 he mannen [.] wildegij mij eens

[mænə]de gemeente

24 hall [.] because uhm [..] 24 laten zien [.] want eh [..]25 I’m coming to get some

documents [.] make somecopies [.]

25 ik kom wa papieren halen [.][ikom �æ pæ"pi…rən ɒ…lə]kopiekes maken [.][ko"pi…kəs]

26 fax an’ all [.] bang some morewhores

26 faxen ditte en datte [.]["fæksə]nog wa hoeren poepen[nox a "hu…rə pupə]

27 JJ: but they can [laughs] comefrom, right, also

27 maar da kunnen er [lacht] ookzijn van eh

28 uh refugees from Morocco [.]not just Poland?

28 vluchtelingen van Marokkodus[.]niet enkel Polen?

29 Faisal: definitely 29 zeker en vast30 Jamal: they are the refugees from

Morocco right30 da zen de vluchtelingen van

Marokko he


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Faisal pictures recent immigrants, even if they are from Morocco, asincomprehensible (‘we don’t understand him’, line 9), and Mourad even callsthem ‘allochthons’ (line 18), a label that typically applies to themselves inFlemish public discourse (cf. section 2). Linguistically Faisal underlines thecontrast by presenting the immigrant as slow and stammering, using Arabiclexemes and talking Dutch with a heavy accent (lines 11–14), and by presentinga competent persona (lines 23–26) as talking swifter, using appropriateadministrative lexemes (copies, faxing), typical dialectal diminutives (kopiekesinstead of standard kopietjes [literally, ‘little copies’]), a characteristic Antwerplexeme (poepen, for banging), and a slightly more dialectal pronunciation (withdialectal long [i…] instead of standard [i…] in words like papieren [‘documents’]and kopiekes [‘little copies’]). It is clear that Antwerp dialect features here help tosignal ‘integration’ into Flemish society or the end-point in a line of development,which apparently for Faisal also implies sexual competence. All in all, this is farfrom a drastic shift, and not an entirely consistent one either given that onlyparts of what Faisal’s competent persona says can be safely seen as typicallyAntwerp dialect. In lines 23–24 the utterance wildegij mij eens de gemeente latenzien (‘could you show me the town hall’) is far from dialectal: it does contain anenclitic pronoun in inversion (wildegij instead of standard wil jij [‘could you’]),but this was also a regular part of their routine vernacular. Likewise, instead ofgemeente (‘town hall’) one would have expected the dialectal stadhuis (‘town hall’,pronounced as [stætɔ�s]), while its pronunciation in line 23 doesn’t in fact differfrom how it is used in lines 11 and 14 as an illustration of incompetent Dutch.Hence, as in the previous example, the stylisation of Antwerp dialect is much lessjuxtaposed to speakers’ ordinary speech style. Rather than a clean switch, wesee how a speaker’s style is suddenly freckled with elements of Antwerp dialectthat are slightly more marked than those that are already part of their regularvernacular, indicating that the boundary between students’ routine style andAntwerp dialect could become quite blurred when there was a strong degree ofalignment between self and voice.

In sum, after describing how Antwerp dialect was stylised as an ‘other’-variety,I have shown in sections 7.1 to 7.4 that features of Antwerp dialect could bemustered to express stances that align (in different degrees) with the utterers’self-identities, up to the point where these features appear to be adopted intoutterers’ routine speech style.

8. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Admittedly, the fact that the same variety or features of it are used both inopposition to and in tune with one’s routine identity has been described before(see Rampton 1995 on Stylised Asian English). But it is striking in this case thata variety that bathes in such a pejorative indexical light can interweave to thisdegree with speakers’ own words.9 To explain this we have to attend to the placeof Antwerp dialect in contemporary Flemish society, and more in particular to its:



(1) age-old position as a dialect in a class-based linguistic hierarchy; and (2) itsnewer position as an urban vernacular at a time when ‘traditional’ immigrantsare being distinguished from new arrivals.

As others have already indicated, it is crucial to see social personae, styles andthe indexically meaningful resources they are made up of not as free-floating butas part of thoroughly hierarchised social worlds where socio-economic elites aredistinguished from non-elites and semi-elites (see e.g. Blommaert 2007). Thesedistinctions are usually made and legitimised according to ideologised standardsof appropriateness, articulateness, educatedness and beauty which assign allavailable resources and their users a higher/lower, better/worse place vis-a-visthe standard. Bauman and Briggs (2003) have described in much detail howideologies of language have played a fundamental role in the legitimation ofthese standards, to the extent that one could draw up a list of binary oppositesheaded by ‘standard’ and ‘dialect’ that capture common-sense social distinctions:high vs. low; refined vs. vulgar/broad; sophisticated vs. uneducated; reason vs.emotion; formal vs. informal; power vs. solidarity; overt vs. covert norms; modernvs. traditional; female vs. male; etc. (see Bourdieu 1991; Gal 1995: 172–173;Pujolar 2001: 137; Rampton 2006; Stallybrass and White 1986; and see section4.1 above). Much of the work done to reproduce and maintain these distinctionstakes place in schools (see e.g. Alim 2010; Erickson 1987; Heller 1999; Hymes1996; Martın-Rojo 2010). It is there that pupils learn to distinguish acceptablefrom unacceptable linguistic behaviour, or learn to interpret socio-ethnic andregional linguistic differences as educational, intellectual and aesthetic ones. Itis there, too, that they learn how language can be a powerful tool for positioningoneself in relation to these social distinctions.

Antwerp dialect and Flemish schools have not been exempt from this, afterdecades of intense standardisation (see section 2). And there are clear echoesof the above-mentioned high/low contrast in the data above if we observe howAntwerp dialect is repeatedly associated with strong emotions, being out ofcontrol, aggression, profanities, bodily fluids and sexuality. It was evident, too,in how students repeatedly used Antwerp dialect as they oriented to, and inthis way highlighted, those moments in the flow of interaction at school wherethe installation of institutional hierarchies was at issue, using a variety that isdiametrically opposed to the proper school variety (sections 2 and 6.1). Thisreadily available, widely recognised, ‘low’ and ‘improper’ meaning naturallyhelps support the construction of oppositional social identities as in Example 5.And if we take into account that – given their technical education track andlimited options in terms of socio-economic mobility – all these students were ontheir way to fairly working-class jobs, and that on numerous occasions in my datathese teenagers were disaligning with middle-class destinations and ambitions,Antwerp dialect features may have been particularly difficult to ignore as semioticbuilding blocks for styling a working-class identity in Flanders.

In a similar vein, Antwerp dialect may have been hard to put aside in view of itsgrowing symbolic capital in contemporary Antwerp. From the 1990s onwards,


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the city has been welcoming many more (kinds of) immigrants from non-traditional sending countries. As elsewhere, this has brought about a situationwhere established immigrant groups, who are now often born-and-bred Antwerpcitizens, become aware of linguistic and cultural differences between themselvesand these new arrivals, and start distinguishing themselves from the latter –materially (e.g. by letting their houses to newcomers) but also symbolically interms of language. As I have described elsewhere (Jaspers 2011), the students inmy data frequently produced harsh stylisations of recent arrivals’ incompetentDutch, and, as Example 6 illustrates, Antwerp dialect features may have beenextremely seductive and useful for such distinction work.10

In other words, Antwerp dialect gives off two sets of potent indexical meaningsthat appear to be irresistible, or that seem to outweigh the negative socialindexes (racism, the extreme right) it conjures up. Obviously, there is alwaysa chance that socio-political evolutions re-emphasise these negative indexesand complicate the dialect’s use in alignment with one’s own voice. Clearly too,teenagers’ use of Antwerp dialect reproduces the broader stigmatisation of dialectfeatures in a linguistically standardised society. But looking at the data aboveand placing them in their societal context, it may not be unreasonable to claimthat as these teenagers are entering adulthood, Antwerp dialect becomes aninvaluable tool for situating themselves on a socio-economic and semiotic high-low axis and in relation to local hierarchies centering on who gets to be seen asan insider versus outsiders such as new arrivals. In addition, this value seemsto make the dialect a prime candidate for appropriation, and it might provide astarting point for explaining how Antwerp dialect features have become a partof these youngsters’ routine Dutch vernacular at all.

This does not mean, however, that Antwerp dialect was or will be appropriatedwholesale or undilutedly. Indeed, the strong stylisations (in sections 6.1 and 7.1)exemplify what is too much, as opposed to those stylisations where speakerssprinkled their speech with Antwerp dialect features, or where stylisationsstarted to shift over into non-special speech (Examples 4 to 6). In line withthis, and although some typical dialect lexemes (such as poepen in Example 6)were popular, there were several occasions in my data when the use of othercharacteristic dialect lexemes was seriously derided. Thus, at one point, Zachariawas severely ridiculed for using the lexeme gezjoept (‘stolen’), and in interviews,ethnic minority students and their white classmates commented on those whowere ‘overdoing it’, each time presenting a dialect lexeme and suggesting a‘normal’, ‘everyday’, less dialectal alternative for it. This is actually in keepingwith variationist research on Flemish dialects (Vandekerckhove 2009) thatshows that lexemes seem to bear the brunt in processes of dialect loss rather thanphonological and morphosyntactical elements. Another constraint to fusionwith Antwerp dialect, as much as with any non-Antwerpian Dutch vernacular,came from co-ethnics who commented on the amount of Arabic or Berber innon-white students’ routine speech. Jamal, for example, complained that he wassometimes held to account for talking ‘like a Belgian’ and not including enough



code-switches into his daily speech. Furthermore, as mentioned in section 3,there was a lot of home-language interference detectable in the routine Dutch ofnon-white students, and this was also the case for their appropriations of Antwerpdialect. This means that appropriations of Antwerp dialect did not involve somekind of rapprochement between non-white and white students in the sense thatthe former started to speak more like the latter: what appears to be appropriatedare only fragments of the dialect, toned down by home-language interference andan overall unpredictability when it comes to the selection of linguistic featuresat different layers of the dialect (phonology, morphosyntax, etc.), such thatthe resulting ordinary style could still be heard as being ‘less dialectal’ by thehead of school (section 3). In fact, any rapprochement appeared to be goingin a different direction, with white teenagers styling their language towardsthe speech of their non-white peers, including its home-language influencedcharacter: non-white students complained that white friends outside schoolattempted to copy their speech (Jaspers 2008), and there are many reportsof such styling processes elsewhere (see the articles in Cornips and Nortier2008).

This shows that students’ speech could be subject to a variety of competingpulls and penalties: while school and society demand that they speak StandardDutch, doing so was difficult to reconcile with the demands of a less prestigiouseducational trajectory and a working-class social horizon. Yet talking toodialectically could invite various sorts of criticism (cf. section 5, ‘overdoing it’),just as a lack of using home-language features could lead to disapproval (‘talkinglike a Belgian’). At the same time, the more their speech was identifiable as foreignor accented, the more it is vulnerable to the stigmatisation they themselves inflicton those whom they see as linguistically incompetent. In this sense it looks asthough, for the teenagers discussed here, all pure varieties and singular identitiesare undesirable, tainted, or risky, but at the same time offer at least some buildingblocks for constructing an urban, working-class identity and vernacular (cf.Rampton 2011).

Naturally, the data that I have discussed above are now ten years old, theywere constituted in one school, and this may not automatically make them arepresentative sample for speaking to contemporary sociolinguistic processes inFlanders or to processes outside school, where institutional relations may beless prominent. The data cannot tell us whether Antwerp dialect is now beingincreasingly appropriated or not. And there may have been more contestation ofappropriating Antwerp dialect in an environment less dominated by non-whiteteenagers. Even so, there are few signs that the practices I observed were highlyexceptional at the time and that the socio-semiotic status quo is now entirelydifferent from a decade ago (cf. section 2, note 2). In any case, the data discussedabove can usefully remind us that:

1. uncool, outmoded and white urban dialects can be important attractionpoles for non-white teenagers with urban, working-class destinations; that


520 JASPERS

2. the allure of such dialects, their semiotic potency and consequent effect onroutine speech styles needs to be studied in ground-level interaction wherestylisations may provide an extremely valuable starting point for analysis;and that

3. urban teenagers are confronted with a complex array of social, ethnic,linguistic, regional and educational dos and don’ts as they style theirdaily speech and find out what side of the linguistic bed they areon.

NOTES

1. The author wishes to thank Frank (aka the Yuri) Brisard, Constadina Charalambous,Elaine Chun, Lian Malai Madsen, Michael Meeuwis, Ben Rampton, Sarah Van Hoof,three anonymous referees, the associate editor of this journal, Monica Heller, andits editor, Allan Bell, for their helpful comments and suggestions. All remainingshortcomings are mine.

2. Data-constitution involved participant observation, interviewing, individual (audio)recording, classroom (audio) recording, and retrospective interviews on extractsfrom the recordings. This resulted in a corpus of 35 hours of individual audio-recording and 35 hours of simultaneous classroom recording, and 45 hours ofinterviews. The fieldwork concentrated on two classes in their last years of secondaryeducation whose major subject was electro-mechanics – a technical secondaryschool trajectory, symbolically occupying a middle position between ‘general’trajectories that prepare students for university, and ‘vocational’ ones that leadto manual-labour jobs. There were thirty-five pupils in two different groups. In eachgroup Moroccan-Flemish boys were 2/3rds of the total pupils; there were threeTurkish-Flemish boys, nine white-Flemish boys and one white-Flemish girl; agesvaried from 16 to 21; backgrounds were working class; all but two were Belgian-born. At the time, one could find many similar classrooms across Antwerp. Interms of educational and socio-economic horizon, little to nothing has changed forstudents such as the ones in my study compared to the present situation. Educationalpolicy on Flemish schools has become even more strictly focused on Standard Dutch(cf. Jaspers 2011). Given the success of Vlaams Blok, its association with Antwerp(where the party has its headquarters), and the fact that dialects and non-standardlanguage use are severely stigmatised in Flemish public discourse, it would havebeen rare to find a totally different set of indexical connotations for Antwerp dialect(cf. section 5) among teenagers from traditional immigrant groups, certainly withinAntwerp. And, even if on a political level the extreme right has now lost a few ofits feathers, it would be wrong to say that interethnic animosity in Antwerp hassubsided to a level that differs from what I found at the time of data constitution.Finally, while I collected most of my data at school, I also saw students outside schooland did not notice much difference in their ways of speaking; neither did studentscomment on each other’s speech as they were addressing me outside school asparticularly ‘schoolish’ or special. In addition, I have frequently observed similarteenagers in Antwerp (in supermarkets, on buses and in other public areas) whoassociated Antwerp dialect with racism (cf. Jaspers 2005: 284) while also using itsfeatures in regular, non-special talk.



3. After a conviction for racism by a Belgian appeals court in April 2004 the partyre-named itself Vlaams Belang (‘Flemish Interest’).

4. Transcription conventions:

Bold stylised Antwerp dialectItalics emphasis, or translation from ArabicCAPITALS increased volume? rising contour. falling contour[.] short pause[..] longer pause[n.n] pause measured by stopwatch[text] stage directions and details( ) inaudible(text) analyst guess| start of new turn

In each data extract, the original Dutch interaction data can be found in the leftcolumn, with an English translation on the right. Non-standard Dutch is translatedinto British colloquial English which may have a slight London flavour (a result ofthe author’s long-term visits to Canterbury and London).

5. The implication is indeed that students with other backgrounds did not producesuch stylisations.

6. Whether or not a certain fragment counted as stylised performance was for themost part informed by my long familiarity with these students’ ways of speakingand by my own knowledge of Antwerp dialect and Standard Dutch as a relativelystandard speaker who grew up and has always lived and worked in Antwerp. Otherimportant indicators included: an increased intensity of dialectal phonetic features;the use of dialectal (instead of standard) personal pronouns, verb conjugationsand diminutives; stereotypically dialectal lexis; and special acoustic design suchas careful articulation, different voice quality, or sudden shifts in loudness andpitch level (for a similar approach, see Pujolar 2001: 129–130; Rampton 2003,2006: 261–263). And ‘[i]f the audience (or the speaker) subsequently respondedby laughing, repeating the utterance, by commenting on it, or by switching into adifferent kind of non-normal dialect or voice, this could be another clue’ (Rampton2003: 55).

7. And this was not the only occasion on which Faisal imitated his technology teacher.8. In fact, this contrast is what may also have made the angry voices outside school

so funny – the evoked characters were always low, marginal, or drunk, but theyattempted something ‘high’ in the eyes of these students: talking about ‘serious’subjects, showing their indignation in favour of appropriate behaviour, or utteringcriticism and expecting that their authority would be accepted, but in a languagethat was seen as unsuitable for these purposes.

9. Rampton (1995) describes how a Creole variety got interwoven with his informants’daily vernacular, but Creole was looked upon much more favourably than Antwerpdialect. Likewise, he describes how Stylised Asian English, which was predominantlystylised vari-directionally, could also function uni-directionally, but this was onlyin the frame of structured games, not in non-playful, regular interaction; and whenSAE was used uni-directionally ‘there was not any movement towards a fusion ofdifferent voices’ (1995: 224). Additionally, Hill (1995) describes how Mock Spanishelements can help construct a vernacular, non-fancy, humour-loving identity, but


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also here the use of Spanish never leads to fusion, or to situations where it becomesdifficult to distinguish between speakers’ routine language and linguistic elementsthat they mock elsewhere.

10. Of course, appropriating Standard Dutch could equally well deflect charges oflinguistic incompetence, but there are no examples in my data where StandardDutch is used in a similar way as in Example 6, and this would also run up againstthe variety’s unsuitability for constructing a working-class identity.

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Address correspondence to:

Jurgen JaspersUniversity of Antwerp

Linguistics DepartmentPrinsstraat 132000 Antwerp

Belgium

[email protected]


Strange bedfellows. Appropriations of a tainted urban dialect.

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