English from Scratch: Preadolescents’ Developing Use of English Lexical Resources in Belgian Dutch

Working within the framework of socio-pragmatic turn in anglicism research, this paper adds a developmental sociolinguistic perspective investigating preadolescents’ use English lexical resources Belgian Dutch. The so far largely undocumented role linguistic transition from childhood to adolescence is analyzed through fieldwork corpus 15,465 utterances, collected during interviews with 26 (12 boys, 14 girls) Dutch preadolescent (6–13 years/o) respondents local hockey club. All material was identified and categorized following three-step identification protocol. This protocol introduces distinction between recognizable unavoidable (RUE) avoidable (RAE). Results reveal that, overall, 9.7% utterances contain (RUE + RAE), RUE being significantly more frequent than RAE. Our findings further indicate only limited stratification according traditional socio-demographic parameters display number outliers respondent profiles. Closer inspection these allows conclusion that community practice studied, an emerging youth language marker, typically used when talking about gaming or girl-oriented activities. In sum, we conclude preadolescents our sample instrumentalize for incipient identity work, both on micro-level (being gamer, soon-to-be teenage girl) as macro-level (through ingroup outgroup marking).