Kristel Doreleijers
Tilburg University
Marking grammatical gender or highlighting local identity? The use of hyperdialectisms in North-Brabantish social media posts.
In the Netherlands, dialects are currently in a stage of dialect levelling. Due to contact with the
standard language and other language varieties, many typical local dialect features disappear.
Simultaneously, dialects are losing their position to Dutch as a first language and a home language. These processes of convergence and language shift lead to levelled, regional varieties rather than
traditional, local varieties.
This presentation focusses on Brabantish dialects, a group of dialects spoken in the southern Dutch
province of North-Brabant. In Brabantish, grammatical gender marking – e.g. the marking of
masculine lexical gender on adnominal words such as (in)definite articles (enen/den) – is one of the
most prominent features. However, due to processes of dialect levelling and language shift,
knowledge of lexical gender is supposedly fading away, leading to the loss of the salient masculine
marker -e(n) (as in Standard Dutch).
Nevertheless, new digital, social media such as Facebook and Instagram, provide dialect speakers
with new ways of expressing themselves, building cultural identities. Dialects that used to be
restricted to spoken contexts now develop their own digital stylistic genre. This might be a
counterforce to dialect loss. In particular, hyperdialectisms – i.e. over-generalizations of typical
dialect features such as gender markers to emphasize a deviation from the standard language – seem
to occur frequently on social media. But how do such hyperdialectisms function in these relatively
new social contexts?
In this talk, I will show how hyperdialectisms are used in a specific type of social media (Instagram)
posts, so-called “tegeltjes”, i.e. posts with virtual tiles that contain idiomatic dialect expressions,
comparable to memes. Between March 2018 and March 2021 a database of more than 300 posts
was compiled for quantitative and qualitative analysis. I will zoom in on the use and overgeneralization
of gender marking in these expressions together with the metalinguistic comments
that were added to these posts, for example on authenticity. The data offers new insights in how
hyperdialectisms contribute to indexing local identity, e.g. “Brabantishness”, on social media.