Chapter published in:
The Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging: Perspectives from the margins
Edited by Leonie Cornips and Vincent A. de Rooij
[IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society 45] 2018
► pp. 55–88

Cité Duits

A polyethnic miners’ variety

| Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
| Meertens Instituut (KNAW) & Maastricht University
In the late 1930s and 1940s, locally born children of immigrant coal miners in Tuinwijk, a neighborhood 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 an in-group language throughout their lives when working underground as well as in their private lives. We will show that Cité Duits is a hybrid variety resulting from combining elements of German, Belgian Dutch and the Maasland dialect spoken in Belgian Limburg through focusing and sedimentation. We argue that Cité Duits developed and continues to be employed as a symbolic language for expressing group identity
Published online: 07 March 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.45.04aue
References

References

Antonsich, M.
2010 Searching for belonging – An analytical framework. Geography Compass 4(6): 644–659. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Barbiers, S., van der Auwera, J., Bennis, H., Boef, E., De Vogelaer, G. & van der Ham, M.
2008 Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND), Vol. II. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.Google Scholar
Beyers, L.
2008 From class to culture: Immigration, recession, and daily ethnic boundaries in Belgium, 1940s–1990s. International Review of Social History 53: 37–61. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cornips, L.
2008 Loosing grammatical gender in Dutch. The result of bilingual acquisition and/or an act of identity? Special issue ‘Ethnolects? The Emergence of New Varieties among Adolescents’. International Journal of Bilingualism 12(1–2): 105–124.Google Scholar
2009 Empirical syntax: Idiolectal variability in two- and three-verb clusters in regional standard Dutch and Dutch dialects. In Describing and Modeling Variation in Grammar, A. Dufter, J. Fleischer & G. Seiler (eds), 203–224. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cornips, L. & Hulk, A.
2006 External and internal factors in bilingual and bidialectal language development: Grammatical gender of the Dutch definite determiner. In L2 Acquisition and Creole Genesis. Dialogues [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 42], C. Lefebvre, L. White & C. Jourdan (eds), 355–378. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cornips, L. & Nortier, J.
(eds) 2008 Ethnolects? The Emergence of New Varieties among Adolescents. International Journal of Bilingualism 12(1–2).Google Scholar
Defoin, G.
1962 Vocabulaire professionel du houilleur belge. Liège: Université de Liège.Google Scholar
Delbroek, B.
2008 Op zoek naar koolputters. Buitenlandse mijnwerkers in Belgisch-Limburg in de twintigste eeuw. Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 5(3): 80–103. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Delbroek B.
2011 ‘In de put’. De Dagelijkse Werking van de Arbeidsmarkt voor Mijnwerkers in Belgisch-Limburg (1900–1966). PhD dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.Google Scholar
Delbroek, B.
2016 In de put. De Arbeidsmarkt voor Mijnwerkers in Belgisch-Limburg, 1900–1966 [Maaslandse Monografieën, Vol. 79]. Sociaal Historisch Centrum. Hilversum: Verloren.Google Scholar
Dorian, N.
(ed.) 1989 Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dorren, G.
2013 Met de Minsten der Mijnen. Geschiedenis van de Kleine Zusters van de H. Joseph. Hilversum: Verloren.Google Scholar
Goossens, J.
1965 Die Gliederung des Südfränkischen. RhVjBl 30: 79–94.Google Scholar
Himmelreich, H.
1943 Volkstümliche Beobachtungen an der Umgangssprache in Gelsenkirchen. PhD dissertation, University of Münster.Google Scholar
Klessman, C.
1986 Comparative immigrant history: Polish workers in the Ruhr area and the North of France. Journal of Social History 20(2): 335–353. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Knotter, A.
2012 Labour migrants and cross-border commuters. Comparative perspectives on mining labour markets in the Belgian-Dutch-German borderland in the twentieth century. In Montanregion als Sozialregion. Zu gesellschaftlichen Dimension von ‘Region’ in der Montanwirtschaft, A. Westermann (ed.), 125–150. Husum: Mathiesen.Google Scholar
Kohlbacher, J.
2012 Cité-Duits. Talk presented at Winterslag, Belgium, 2 June.
McCook, B.
2006 Migration, citizenship, and Polish integration in the Ruhr valley and northeastern Pennsylvania, 1870–1924. German Historical Institute (Washington), Bulletin 38: 119–353.Google Scholar
Minten, L.
2006 Beeldvorming. In De Koolputters. Geschiedenis van de Limburgse Mijnwerkers, F. Delarbre, B. Delbroek et al. (eds), 395–416. Zwolle: Waanders.Google Scholar
Muysken, P.
2000 Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Nortier, J. & Svendsen, B. A.
(eds) 2015 Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century: Linguistic Practices Across Urban Spaces. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pecht, N.
2013 “Siehs’ du, du wars (…) besser wie du hast gedacht: Du has’ Französisch gesprochen!” Taal en Tongval 65(2): 149–169. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pecht, N.
2015 The postfield in Cité Duits: Syntactic variation in in-group speech. In Artikelen van de 8ste Anéla Conferentie Toegepaste Taalwetenschap 2015, M. Boogaard, B. van den Bogaerde, S. Bacchini, M. Curcic, N. de Jong, E. le Pichon & L. Rasier 39–58. Delft: Eburon.Google Scholar
Rampton, B.
1995 Crossing. Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Salewski, K.
1998 Zur Homogenität des Substandards älterer Bergleute im Ruhrgebiet. Stuttgart: Steiner.Google Scholar
Stuyck, K., Luyten, S., Kesteloot, C., Meert, H. & Peleman, K.
2008 A geography of gender relations: Role patterns in the context of different regional industrial development. Regional Studies 42(1): 69–82. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tsimpli, I. & Hulk, A.
2013 Grammatical gender and the notion of default: Insights from language acquisition Lingua 137: 128–144. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van de Wijngaard, T. & Crompvoets, H.
1989 Mijnwerkersterminologie in de beide Limburgen: Meer verscheidenheid dan eenheid. Mededelingen van de Vereniging voor Limburgse Dialect- en Naamkunde 51. http://​www​.dbnl​.org​/tekst​/wijn035mijn01​_01/>
Yuval-Davis, N.
2006 Belonging and the politics of belonging. Patterns of Prejudice 40(3): 197–214. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by other publications

Jaspers, Jürgen
2018.  In The Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging [IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society, 45], ► pp. 17 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 01 january 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.