The (near) absence of English in Flemish dinner table conversations

Abstract

Abstract This paper studies the low frequency of English insertions in child-directed speech in eight Flemish families, which is striking considering the strong position of English in other domains in Flanders. Crossing usage-based approaches to language acquisition and language socialization research, we scrutinize our corpus of dinner table conversations that consist of over 25,000 utterances, complemented by sociolinguistic interviews with the caregivers of each family. After mining our corpus for English insertions, we present a quantitative exploration that reveals how less than 1% of the utterances per family contain English insertions. Assessing whether this result can be interpreted as parents’ attempts to socialize their children towards Dutch, and what this reveals about their language regards, we analyze selected fragments through multimodal discourse analysis. After discussing possible implications of these findings for the position of English in Flanders, we additionally discuss them against the theoretical background of developmental sociolinguistics, and against the methodological background of working with small samples and negative evidence in a usage-based approach (see e.g. negative entrenchment.