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Call for papers

Since 1839, Limburg belongs to two countries—being spread out over the southernmost province of the Netherlands and the easternmost province of Flanders—but as a political unity, it significantly predates the two Lowland kingdoms. While each of the Limburgs has been the object of linguistic study, almost no research has been dedicated to the whole of the area, and the potential of Limburg as a laboratory to investigate the linguistic impact of political reorganization and nation state formation has gone virtually unappreciated.

This workshop intends to fill these gaps. It is anchored in two historical events which have had profound consequences for Limburgian culture and language, viz. the territorial reorganization in 1839 which split Limburg in half, but also the discovery and large-scale exploitation of coal in the 20th century and its concomitant demographic changes.

The LiME-group of the Meertens Institute has invited speakers from different linguistic backgrounds (formal linguistics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics and anthropological linguistics) to address one or more of the following three questions.

  • Is there one grammar of Limburgian, or has the territorial reorganization of 1839 engendered the emergence of two or more grammars? Is there top-down impact of the diverging Belgian and Netherlandic standard languages on the dialects on either side of the border?
  • What is the impact of migration and diversity on language varieties in the two Limburgs? How do the grammars of different language systems interact, viz. the local dialects, the languages of migrant workers (German, Polish, Italian, Arabic), and Belgian and Netherlandic Standard Dutch? Have other contact varieties emerged in addition to Cité Duits (Pecht 2021)?
  • Why is Genk but not Heerlen a capital of cool? Is it the preponderance of Italian migrant labourers in Genk – whereas Heerlen attracted for the most part German workers? Does the peninsular isolation of Netherlandic Limburg play a role? Is regional identity in Netherlandic Limburg more important than multiethnic identity? Or does the extreme cultural dominance of the Randstad area block the potential for change in marginal areas?

We invite 30 minute contributions which zoom in on the workshop’s research topics, but which need not be restricted to the Limburg, or even to the Dutch language area. 

Potential topics include:

  • What is the impact of (new) state borders on older dialect continuums? How do standard language dynamics in the constituent states affect dialect and standard language production on opposite sides of the new border? Does the new political reality exclusively affect the dialects’ more superficial layers (lexicon and phonetics) or does it also penetrate deeper into their syntactic motor?
  • What is the impact of industrialization (and the concomitant labour migration and new diversity) on regional dialects? How do regional and ethnic variants compete in communities which have become superdiverse on account of migration?
  • How is (regional) identity expressed and evaluated in superdiverse communities?

Colleagues interested in presenting a paper are requested to submit a 300 word abstract to both stef.grondelaers@meertens.knaw.nl and roeland.vanhout@ru.nl by June 15, 2024. Submitters will be notified of acceptance or rejection by June 30, 2024. We specifically encourage undergraduate and PhD-students to submit abstracts.