Young Dutch speakers are coming of age in a world where English is playing an increasingly visible role. Not only are the media these young people consume (in the form of music, books, television, and film, as well as online... [ view full abstract ]
Young Dutch speakers are coming of age in a world where English is playing an increasingly visible role. Not only are the media these young people consume (in the form of music, books, television, and film, as well as online media) overwhelmingly English, but the language has also become the main language of many Dutch universities and workplaces, and even an important part of young Dutch speakers’ casual interaction among each other.
Against this backdrop, this paper examines the use of and the attitudes toward the use of trans-national English in one Dutch social media community, focusing specifically on members’ appropriative uses of such practices in order to index a particular English-language culture or subculture. I am interested in two things: the ways that community members appropriate trans-national English, and the community-internal perceptions of this appropriation. The qualitatively analyzed data are therefore drawn firstly from the social media interaction itself, focusing on excerpts in which appropriative trans-national English occurs, but also from interviews with community members about these excerpts, focusing on the judgments (positive, negative, and otherwise) that they make about the practices in question. With respect to both the social media data and the interview data, then, the analysis focuses on the ways in which these young people use positioning to express their own and other users’ identities, as well as to express orientations toward social categories.
The results suggest that even in these clearly deliberate and strategic uses of trans-national English to index some specific "other" culture, such appropriative practices are always simultaneously localized within the Dutch context. This gives rise to a complex and creatively reterritorialized indexicality in which interactants do not just just point to whatever "other" culture originally gave rise to such uses of English, but retain bits of that culture while also semiotically rearranging those bits into something clearly local. The implications of these findings for a theory of international English are discussed, focusing on the extent to which the language is viewed by Dutch young people not merely as the property of English-speaking countries, but as a "neutral" language belonging to everyone.
