L. Cornips

Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen | KNAW · NL-Lab Humanities Cluster

Dit hoofdstuk verkent taal buiten de traditionele taalkundige grenzen van menselijke spraak en gebaren, met als doel te laten zien dat de interactiepatronen van niet-menselijke dieren ook in de taalkunde het bestuderen waard zijn. We willen zo een bijdrage leveren aan het bredere veld van diercommunicatie en de vergelijkende taalkunde, en een diepe...

Nonhuman animals can be studied using (human) sociolinguistic theories and observational methods, regardless of whether the focus is on statistical correlations between variation in sound production and social categories like age or sex or on their embodied meaning-making practices and how power inequalities (age, gender) are shaped within these se...

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the...

This article moves from the familiar—the human—to the very different in sociolinguistics—the dairy cow. Based on multispecies ethnography, the aim of this article is to advocate the animal turn in sociolinguistics (Cornips 2019). The guiding question is how do non-human animals, that is, dairy cows—mutually and with humans—imbue their intraspecies...

(English below) In het project Koeientaal in beeld door de Vakbond van Dieren, mede mogelijk gemaakt door het Barth-Misset Fonds hebben we de taal van koeien in beeld gebracht. We hebben op acht verschillende bedrijven (intensieve melkveehouderijen, biologische melkveehouderijen, een groot en een klein rusthuis voor koeien) opnamen gemaakt van hun...

In this chapter, two interspecies interactions between a (dairy) cow and human(s) i.e. “give a cookie” and ‘untie my neck-chain” have been contrasted with respect to particulars of events in a situated context. The lens of languaging as a normal cooperative and coordinated activity in interspecies interactions enables one to show how patterns of th...

This co-authored chapter draws on our diverse experiences of time spent in the presence of cows: Mark’s years-long performance work with cows (2004–ongoing), following a childhood growing up on a dairy farm; Lucy’s collaboration with Mark to make the film Winterage: Last Milk (2019–2024 ongoing); Leonie’s fieldwork into the language of cows (2019–o...

This paper focuses on the variable use of partitive er in two types of constructions. First, er combined with cardinal numbers like drie ‘three’ and quantifiers like genoeg ‘enough’. Second, er combined with an elliptical noun referring to age and weight. Er should be present in the first case (Ik heb *(er) drie ‘I have three’) but absent in the se...

Welkom bij de koeientaal site. Klik op een van de foto’s om meer te leren welke geluiden een koe maakt en over de taal van de koeien. De situatie waarin de koe zich bevindt in relatie tot andere koeien en mensen is van belang om een idee te krijgen wat ze wil uitdrukken. De meeste geluiden van de koeien zijn afkomstig uit het onderzoek van dr. ing....

Moving beyond a more traditional view of language as a discrete sociocultural and cognitive entity that distorts our understanding of surrounding ecologies, this book argues that the starting point for ecolinguistics is an appreciation of language as not just about nature, but of nature. Exploring this conceptual change in the field, the book prese...

Dit artikel gaat over hoe taalkeuze thuis en hoe die taal(variëteit) bijdraagt aan sociaal kapitaal in Nederland gebaseerd op een representatief nationaal onderzoek (2019) naar sociale cohesie en welzijn en taalgebruik onder ruim 7.500 mensen van 15 jaar of ouder. Sociaal kapitaal is vastgesteld aan de hand van 17 participatie- en vertrouwensindica...

This paper aims to describe a pathway for linguistics to transcend the assumptions of human exceptionalism and species hierarchy in order to try to understand initiated interactions of dairy cows with humans. It explores the hypothesis that “doing language” by nonhuman animals with human animals in interspecies communication, in this case between d...

The present paper contributes to the emerging field of embodied interaction. It reports on research into deictic interactions between a human and a non-human, specifically a cat, interlocutor, applying a pragmatic framework developed for human–human communicative interactions. We analyse video recordings of interactions where a cat is a deictic age...

Cité Duits – A Polyethnic Miners’ Variety. In the late 1930s and 1940s, locally born children of immigrant coal miners in Tuinwijk, a neighbourhood in the village of Eisden in Belgian Limburg, developed a way of speaking among themselves which they later labelled Cité Duits. Having become coal miners themselves, they continued to use Cité Duits as...

This is a popsci article (in Dutch, try Google Translate) about research on animal language, specifically targeting the signals and intentions of domestic cows.

This chapter scrutinizes the ways in which current sociolinguistic research at Maastricht University, and more specifically within the context of the Chair in ‘Languageculture in Limburg,’ is conducted. By outlining three case-studies pertaining to the Dutch and Belgian provinces of Limburg, we show how we deploy ethnographic and sociolinguistic me...

This paper outlines a regional and socio-demographic overview of languages and dialects used most often in and outside the home and on social media in the Netherlands based on a large-scale national representative survey by Statistics Netherlands conducted in 2019 among 7,652 people aged 15 years or older. 149 different languages/dialects were repo...

Aims and objectives We discuss how children with various language backgrounds interact in preschool playgrounds in Limburg, the Netherlands. This paper addresses the question how power dynamics between Dutch and/or Limburgish, and other languages are enacted in, by, and through language choice in preschool settings, and to what extent this leads to...

Research has shown that bidialectal children may reveal patterns of language acquisition that differ from monolingual children. In this chapter, we discuss this research and report on a new study addressing the question as to how bidialectal acquisition affects the acquisition of literacy, in particular, spelling and reading comprehension. In order...

What explains variation in human language? How are linguistic and social factors related? How do we examine possible semantic differences between variants? These questions and many more are explored in this volume, which examines syntactic variables in a range of languages. It brings together a team of internationally acclaimed authors to provide p...

The paper makes a case for an animal turn in postcolonial (socio)linguistics as a way of critically engaging with language ideologies towards animal speakers, and how they create unequal relations of power. An animal turn in linguistics provides the opportunity to develop a theory of a relational framework focusing on language as local meaning-maki...

This chapter is an enquiry into whether we can predict whether a particular instance of variation at the syntactic level may reflect social stratification or not (Labov 1966, 1972, 1994). Therefore, a range of syntactic variables in Dutch has been examined that may reveal social correlations in the spontaneous speech of 67 speakers who were born, g...

Koeientaal vragenlijst, zie https://koeientaal.survey.clariah.nl/index.php/915643 In de onderzoekswereld groeit de aandacht voor overlap tussen sociale en cognitieve capaciteiten van dieren en mensen. Dit komt door de snel verminderende biodiversiteit en groeiende ongelijkwaardigheid tussen mensen en andere dieren. Binnen de taalkunde doet men st...

On Twitter, many users tweet in more than one language. In this study, we examine the use of two Dutch minority languages. Users can engage with different audiences and by analyzing different types of tweets, we find that characteristics of the audience influence whether a minority language is used. Furthermore, while most tweets are written in Dut...

Dit artikel geeft een overzicht van het gerapporteerde taalgebruik op basis van unieke gegevens, verzameld in 2019 onder 7 652 personen van 15 jaar of ouder in het onderzoek Sociale Samenhang en Welzijn. De gegevens zijn afkomstig uit een representatieve steekproef, waarmee een leemte wordt gevuld in de kennis over actuele informatie over de omvang...

This paper examines the acquisition of grammatical gender of indefinite and definite DPs in Danish. It investigates which grammatical contexts further acquisition and which slow it down, and whether distinguishing between monolinguals and bilinguals makes a difference. Danish has a two-way gender distinction (common and neuter), fusing gender with...

This paper investigates how linguistic research can contribute to the field of interspecies studies through an ethnographic study on human-goat communication. It addresses two research questions: whether traditional discourse analytic theory can be used to analyze non-human communication, and whether the specific concepts of communicative events, p...

Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork at an intensive dairy farm, this chapter examines the usefulness of posthuman critical theory for developing a new sociolinguistic approach to nonhuman animal agency. We explore how dairy cows, as encaged sentient beings whose mobility is profoundly restricted by bars and fences, negotiate their environment as...

This article examines how inhabitants of Heerlen, a town in the province of Limburg in the southeast of the Netherlands, renew the cultural memory of coal mining in the area through parodic linguistic and cultural practices linked to the (re)articulation of collective local and social identities. Heerlen became a center for the coal mining industry...

On Ascension Day 2017 (May 25), a football derby was played in Maastricht, the capital city of Limburg; located in the far south east of the Netherlands. MVV, the football club of Maastricht faced the football club of Kerkrade, Roda JC. Maastricht borders Belgium in the far southwest whereas Kerkrade borders Germany in the far southeast corner of t...

see: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-germanic-linguistics/issue/special-issue-gender-in-germanic/D93D50FE7E2ABA62795EC57FEB1D1F62

In this paper, we investigate the research question: How are female dialect users from former industrial areas depicted in media? by comparing two former industrial areas namely Østfold, Norway and Heerlen/Parkstad, the Netherlands. Our results show that being local seems to conflict with normative conceptions of feminity in the selected media repr...

In this paper, we investigate the research question ‘How are female dialect users from former industrial areas depicted in the media?’ by comparing media representations from two former industrial areas, namely Heerlen/Parkstad in the Netherlands and Østfold in Norway. Both representations are parodic and can be characterised as ‘high performances’...

Nederlands, zie hieronder The aim of this video is to promote teaching and research in which humans and animals are considered as interconnected, problematising our Western ideas about the opposition between nature and culture. This is important since there is an increasing concern about the current human impact of a huge scale on ecosystems, all o...

This chapter will focus on the linguistic and cultural effects of a historical language contact process in the city of Heerlen, which was the center of the Eastern Mine District in the Dutch province of Limburg. In the beginning years of the 20 th century, the expanding coal mining industry attracted numerous migrants and their language varieties f...

Sinds 6 november 2019 is er een Convenant inzake de Nederlandse erkenning van de Limburgse taal, getekend in Venlo door de minister van Binnenlandse Zaken en de provincie Limburg. De titel van dit Limburgse convenant wijkt af van het convenant voor het Nedersaksisch waarboven de Nederlandse erkenning van de regionale Nedersaksische taal prijkt. Het...

This article addresses the question as to why toddlers in The Netherlands may stop speaking their regional language—Limburgish—as their home language after entering preschool, even when both parents speak Limburgish at home. The question is addressed through the concept of the total linguistic fact (Silverstein 1985): language ideology, language ch...

This article addresses the question as to why toddlers in The Netherlands may stop speaking their regional language—Limburgish—as their home language after entering preschool, even when both parents speak Limburgish at home. The question is addressed through the concept of the total linguistic fact (Silverstein 1985): language ideology, language ch...

The aim of this paper is twofold. The first section summarises what little is known about the acquisition of dialects and dialect features by locally born speakers whose parent(s) have a migration background, thus second-generation migrants in the Netherlands. The second part focusses on the province of Dutch Limburg, which is known for its widespr...

Various studies have shown that bilingual children score lower than their monolingual peers on standardized receptive vocabulary tests. This study investigates if this effect is moderated by language distance. Dutch receptive vocabulary was tested with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). The impact of cross-language distance was examined by...

This paper investigates the use of modal particles in spoken Dutch imperatives. Two types of particles are differentiated: mitigating, which are often used as a politeness strategy, and reinforcing, which add extra force to the utterance (Vismans 1994). Our findings show that in Netherlandic Dutch, the use of mitigating particles is determined by t...

This paper is an inquiry into whether we can predict whether a particular instance of variation at the syntactic level may reflect social stratification or not (Labov 1966, 1972, 1994). In order to answer this question, I examine whether a range of syntactic variables in Dutch reveals social correlations in the spontaneous speech of 67 speakers who...

A first collective volume on language in the mines We have just published a special issue of the International Journal for the Sociology of Language on language use in the mines. Language use in mining poses a particular challenge, since mining creates very specific social ecological circumstances. The issue came out of a symposium comparing mining...

This article compares sociolinguistic and structural outcomes of language contact processes in two mining areas on two different continents, namely the Katanga region in the southeast of what is now the DR Congo, Africa and Heerlen as centre of the former Eastern Mine District in the southeastern province of Limburg in the Netherlands, Europe. Seve...

Samenvatting In dit artikel tonen we aan de hand van kwalitatieve data aan hoe talige praktijken met sprekers en artiesten uit drie steden in de periferie van Nederland en België, namelijk Tilburg, Heerlen en Genk een lokale identiteit construeren en reproduceren en hoe op die manier het besef van lokale eigenheid tot stand komt. We laten zien dat...

This paper investigates the use of modal particles in spoken Dutch imperatives. Two types of particles are differentiated: mitigating, which are often used as a politeness strategy, and reinforcing, which add extra force to the utterance (Vismans 1994). Our findings show that, in Netherlandic Dutch, the use of mitigating particles is determined by...

Embodied Grammar in Dutch Dairy cows – Poster Abstract Leonie Cornips1,2 and Marjo van Koppen1,3: Embodied Grammar (1) Meertens Instituut (KNAW), (2) Maastricht University, (3) Utrecht University With this poster, we focus on our new research project examining inter- and intraspecies language practices which provide a new lens on the concept of g...

The aim of this paper is to address the question why in (socio)linguistics we a-priori draw a basic particular distinction, claimed to be universal, between humans and other animals (Pennycook 2018). I will make a plea for an inclusive linguistics in which research of non-human animal languages and/or our interactions with them may become common pr...

Dat heel Europa voor het Engels kiest, betekent een enorme versmalling in het taalaanbod. Dat baart zorgen. Leonie Cornips Ondanks dat taalkundig en cognitieonderzoek laat zien dat kinderen en volwassenen prima twee talen als moedertalen kunnen beheersen, denken velen dat meertalige kinderen eerder taalachterstandskinderen zullen worden. Het alleda...

Eind 2017 zorgde de Taalunie-enquête De Staat van het Nederlands voor onrust: waarom moesten, bijvoorbeeld, Limburgers, in die enquête invullen dat ze thuis 'Nederlands' spraken, wanneer dat in werkelijkheid Venloos was? Inmiddels zijn de partijen gelijkgestemd.[...] deed de overheidsorganisatie de toezegging om in een vervolgonderzoek alle regiona...

This paper examines how inhabitants of Heerlen relate to the coalmining past of this city through a variety of languagecultural practices that cut across diverse media forms and genres, both textual (poems, rap songs), visual (portrait photography, material commodities), and digital (posts on Facebook, YouTube videos). Through these practices peopl...

Mia is verhuisd, ze moest wel. Een nieuwe kamer, nieuwe buren, verzorgenden, keukenpersoneel, managers: ze kreeg ze er allemaal bij. Haar eigen aardappels hoeft ze niet meer te schillen, en ook de afwas wordt gedaan. Daar had ze altijd al een hekel aan, maar toch. Een nieuw thuis maken, hoe doe je dat? Hoogleraar Taal-cultuur in Limburg Leonie Cor...

The research question in this paper was how do people in Limburg construct local identities through language practices and what empirical domain, i.e., morphosyntax and phonology, is exploited in this identity formation?

Stadsarchief Amsterdam Published on Oct 25, 2018 Een reis langs straattaal door de eeuwen heen: van bonefluijter en zwabberkappetijn tot kill en smatje. Van het Archief van de Amsterdamse Notarissen tot aan het Smibanese woordenboek van vandaag. Gefilmd door Come Amsterdam & Swinkels & Swinkels, in opdracht van het Stadsarchief Amsterdam. Met Soor...

Looking at the territorial history of the area it would be very hard to sustain that there was a special ‘Dutch Limburg’ regional character, culture, language, or even ethnos, originating in the past before there was a province of that name, so before 1839 or 1815. Nevertheless, before World War II serious ethnologists thought so, or were looking f...

This book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller’s (2000) and Müller and Hulk’s (2001) hypotheses on cross-linguistic influence as a starting point, the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in t...

This volume shows the relevance of the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘belonging’ for understanding the dynamics of identification through language. It also opens up a new terrain for sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological study, namely the margins. Rural, as well as urbanized areas that are seen as marginal or peripheral to places that are overtl...

This volume shows the relevance of the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘belonging’ for understanding the dynamics of identification through language. It also opens up a new terrain for sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological study, namely the margins. Rural, as well as urbanized areas that are seen as marginal or peripheral to places that are overtl...

This volume shows the relevance of the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘belonging’ for understanding the dynamics of identification through language. It also opens up a new terrain for sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological study, namely the margins. Rural, as well as urbanized areas that are seen as marginal or peripheral to places that are overtl...

This paper entails a perspective on bilingual child acquisition through the lens of sociolinguistic approaches. A discussion of the concepts of monolingual language ideology and power dynamics is undertaken in order to reveal their important consequences on studying bilingual child acquisition, in particular, which (parts of) language(s) and childr...

Preston (2011:10) uses the cover term language regard “for all approaches to the study of nonspecialist belief about and reaction to language use, structure, diversification, history, and status,” including ethnography, folk linguistics, language ideology, and the psychology and sociology of language as well. Preston (2011:10) prefers regard over a...

Revitalisation of Heerlen’s coal mining past through languagecultural practices This paper examines how inhabitants of Heerlen relate to the coal mining past of this city through a variety of languagecultural practices that cut across diverse media forms and genres, both textual (poems, rap songs), visual (portrait photography, material commodities...

This paper addressed the question how the use of Dutch and the regional languages Frisian or Limburgish differ on Twitter and which patterns in language choice can be identified. Previous quantitative studies (Jongbloed-Faber, Van de Velde, Van der Meer & Klinkenberg, 2016; Nguyen, Trieschnigg & Cornips, 2015; Trieschnigg, 2015) have already shown...

This volume provides an overview of the current state in theorizing about cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism and presents a collection of studies that reflects the breadth and depth of research on cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. The primary reason of this volume, however, is to honour Aafke Hulk who, throughout her career, has i...

This book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller’s (2000) and Müller and Hulk’s (2001) hypotheses on cross-linguistic influence as a starting point, the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in t...

Het gebruik van dialect/Limburgs op sociale media

This chapter first introduces the physical, infrastructural and population characteristics of the Randstad in the dominant part of the Netherlands in some detail, which explain the specific language variation situation in this region and the challenges it poses in the second part. The final part of the chapter provides specific illustration of urba...

This article aims to encourage the interdisciplinary study of ‘languageculture’, an approach to language and culture in which ideology, linguistic and cultural forms, as well as practices are studied in relation to one another. An integrated analysis of the selection of linguistic and cultural elements provides insight into how these choices arise...

The main questions of this paper are whether children acquire adults' variable V1-V2/V2-V1 word order in the perfective two-verb cluster simultaneously with a rigid V1-V2 word order in the modal two-verb cluster from start of the acquisition process. The experimental results show that children acquire variable word orders following rigid ones confi...

Language Variation - European Perspectives VI showcases a selection of papers from the 8th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe which was held in Leipzig in 2015. The volume includes plenaries by Miriam Meyerhoff and Steffen Klaere (“The large and the small of it: Big issues with smaller samples in the study of language variatio...

This study focuses on the relationship between dialect use and the acquisition of standard Dutch vocabulary by young children in the Dutch province of Limburg. 5 The results of a newly-developed dialect expressive vocabulary task show extensive inter-individual variation that does not support a dichotomous distinction between monolingual and bidial...

Many studies have shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks testing executive functioning, but other studies have not revealed any effect of bilingualism. In this study we compared three groups of bilingual children in the Netherlands, aged 6–7 years, with a monolingual control group. We were specifically interested in testing...

Through the New Skills for New Jobs initiative, the European Commission wants to (1) promote better anticipation of future skills needs, (2) develop better matching between skills and labour market needs and (3) bridge the gap between the worlds of education and work. With relatively little effort, the use of lingua receptiva can contribute signifi...