Goed of fout

Abstract

Abstract Modern colloquial standard Dutch has a number of features involving non-standard inflection (verbal, adnominal, pronominal; involving gender, person, number and case), which appear to participate in ongoing processes of deflection. We focus on ten constructions, nine of which concern non-standard inflection. After discussing each phenomenon from the perspective of its place in the grammatical system, we introduce an online survey on the evaluation and reported use of each phenomenon. Sociobiographical background data are available for over 1600 of the respondents, a third of whom claim to speak a specific Dutch dialect. The data for the 1515 Dutch respondents for each feature are analysed quantitatively on three different scales, as well as on a dialect-standard scale, for the reported own use as well as the perceived use in the respondents’ environments. The features appear to be stratified both according to evaluation and style. Several features turn out to be sensitive to the speakers’ dialect background, only few of them to sociobiographical background and a third subset to neither. At least one phenomenon seems to be subject to ongoing change, driven by age; some phenomena have de facto been elevated to the standard norm. In the patterning of the phenomena studied, internal grammatical factors do not appear to play a significant role as against sociolinguistic ones. Especially perceptual and evaluative considerations appear to determine the results.