Ethnolects are language varieties that are originally spoken by a particular ethnic group, such as Indisch Dutch, Surinamese Dutch and Moroccan Dutch. In the first instance, it is first-generation migrants who let characteristics from their mother tongue resound in their Dutch. But the second and later generations also use these components – often consciously – as identity markers. Frans Hinskens wrote about it in Wide-branched roots .
Ethnolects are of all times. Hinskens shows that large groups of migrants have also been settling in the Netherlands for centuries. They learn Dutch and leave traces of their mother tongue in it. Some of those ethnolectic characteristics are also adopted by the native population. From the sixteenth century, large groups of Jews came to the Netherlands, and the name Mokum for Amsterdam goes back to the Yiddish and Hebrew words for 'city'.
Colonial history has produced ethnolects such as Surinamese Dutch and Indies Dutch. In Dutch we still find words like soebatten and battle, that come from Malay. Incidentally, these alien characteristics are not only found in the vocabulary, but in all layers of the language. For example, both Surinamese and Indo-Dutch have that characteristic pronunciation of the w (oewee) and a trembling tongue point-r.
Moroccan and Turkish
From the beginning of the twentieth century we have to deal with many labor migrants. First, large groups of Poles and Chinese come to the Netherlands to find work. After the Second World War, many migrants come from the countries around the Mediterranean, especially Morocco and Turkey. The children of these migrant groups also develop their own ethnolect.
The characteristics of these ethnolects have been studied over the past ten years under the supervision of Frans Hinskens and Pieter Muysken of Radboud University. They specifically concerned ethnolects as spoken by young Moroccan and Turkish Dutch in Amsterdam and Nijmegen. In this study, conversations between boys aged ten to twelve and eighteen to twenty years old were recorded. They had conversations with each other and with boys of Dutch origin.
Deficient Dutch?
According to Hinskens, ethnolects have a relatively young research tradition for several reasons:“Ethnolects are quite complex. It is very difficult to point out an ethnic component from the outside. Take the sentence:I'm going to go to town. This construction occurs in Surinamese, but also in many Flemish dialects.”
There are also language features that occur in multiple ethnolects, without having a specific ethnic component:they arose as 'errors' in the language acquisition process. Such as mistakes made in the gender of words (the girl who ). Hinskens:“Vocabulary is not predictable in Dutch. If you don't get it hammered in from an early age – because that's basically what we do with our poor children – you'll never learn it completely. Anyone who learns Dutch as a second language – regardless of their mother tongue – has difficulty with this.”
But it is also true that the language of migrants used to be approached very differently, according to the researcher. “The question then was:how badly do they still speak Dutch? The 'deficient' Dutch was seen as something 'which they will get over if they are in the Netherlands long enough'. Now we know from all kinds of research that language forms such as the girl do not have to be of poor Dutch. Because the guys who use them mostly use them among themselves. It turns out that they do indeed master the standard.”
Zze zzegge
There were also important differences between the Turkish and Moroccan Dutch, says Hinskens. Turkish young people, for example, exchanged more often between Dutch and Turkish in the conversations. This is because they often speak Turkish with each other, but in this situation had to speak Dutch.
But they also adopted Moroccan characteristics slightly more often in their speech. The professor explains this because Moroccan Dutch is slightly stronger in the Netherlands:“Morocco is much more multilingual than Turkey. The old 'cultural language' is French. There is one written language, Classical Arabic, that is not spoken. The spoken language is Moroccan Arabic, but mainly Berber. That is why Moroccan Dutch speak Moroccan Dutch more often among themselves.”
“What was striking:we also encountered features from Moroccan Dutch, which we know come from Moroccan Arabic or Berber, in the Turkish and native Dutch. Such as the sharp z, which more often sounds like an s in spoken Dutch. Moroccan Dutch can also extend it as in zzegge. In doing so, they add a length contrast to Dutch, which comes from Arabic. There extension has a grammatical meaning:zenqa for example means 'street' and zzenqa ‘the street’.”
City pronunciation
Young people with a Moroccan or Turkish background sometimes consciously use their ethnolect to emphasize their identity. When they talk to native Dutch youngsters, they use the standard form much more often, the study shows. But these youngsters do something remarkable in their use of language. They not only borrow elements from their parents' language, but also pick their own language variants from the street. Just like in slang, in which multiple language varieties are also mixed.
“We see this especially in the pronunciation of the standard Dutch ij/ei. It sounds like èè in the Nijmegen city dialect; the aa variant occurs in Amsterdam. Young Turkish and Moroccan Dutch people more often use these old dialect variants. They generally also live in poorer city districts, where you still hear a lot of urban dialect.”
The young people are well aware that the variants they use are not standard forms. And it is therefore conceivable that they will not raise their children with those local variants later on, Hinskens suggests. “But you can never predict that. You couldn't have predicted in the past that certain Moroccan or Turkish elements would continue to exist in second-generation Dutch. They use those characteristics because it has social added value. So it is quite possible that the children of this generation will also get it that way.”