Online PhD conferral mrs. Nantke Pecht, MA

Key words: linguistics, language and migration, language-dialect contact, Belgian Dutch, German, Limburgish dialects

"Language contact in a mining community. A study of Variation in Personal Pronouns and Progressive Aspect in Cité Duits"

Cité Duits (lit. ‘mining district German’) emerged as a Belgian Dutch-Maaslands-German contact variety among the children of immigrant miners in the coalmining district of Belgian Eisden in the 1930s. Following a sociolinguistic and grammatical framework, this dissertation examines the linguistic character of Cité Duits with a focus on personal pronouns and progressive aspect. It studies the underlying language contact dynamics and explores the emergence and social functions of Cité Duits. For the analysis, the researcher combined methods of data collection from sociolinguistics (e.g. group recordings) and linguistic anthropology (e.g. observations).

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