From ‘dankgevingsdag' to 'turkey party’: Historical sociolinguistic perspectives on loan strategies in Flemish-American heritage newspapers

Abstract

Within the domain of historical sociolinguistics, attention for heritage languages has been on the rise in the last decade (see e.g., Brown 2019; Litty 2019). The goal of this paper is to contribute to that growing body of research studying the role of sociolinguistic factors in heritage language use in the past, by looking at the lexical output of Belgian emigrants in the United States using heritage newspapers. We will investigate the borrowing patterns in three Flemish-American newspapers that were published in the 19th and 20th centuries and circulated widely within the Flemish-American communities. We focus on (1) borrowing rate (how many English-origin lexemes are transferred?), and (2) borrowing type (which loan processes are involved?). The findings are interpreted in terms of the social variables time and space to chart diachronic as well as regional differences, besides looking at differences between the newspapers more generally.