Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Style and Styling 199
only possible if Standard Dutch is conventionally associated with highstatus,
teachers’ voices and a certain standoffi shness (participants would
have had to look for quite different, and much more opaque, meaning if
Mourad had stylised Antwerp dialect).
No doubt one of the reasons for this conventional association is that the
school these ethnic minority students (most of the ones I followed were of
Moroccan descent) attended is part of a wider community called Flanders,
the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium. Linguistically, widespread
images and understandings of what Flanders should look like put a premium
on Standard Dutch, and on speaking Dutch rather than ethnic
minority languages. This was echoed in the school language rules (‘When
at school, speak Standard Dutch’), and a small variationist analysis I did
bore out that these understandings had also inscribed themselves on
speakers’ daily speech routines: students used more standard features in
formal situations, and more vernacular features on less formal occasions.
Moreover, in the interviews I organised with them, students largely
seemed to agree with offi cial language policies, since they explicitly and
repeatedly supported Standard Dutch as a very useful, prestigious and
necessary variety, for example in potential future jobs. Yet, in daily interactions
they mostly refrained from speaking Standard Dutch and dearly
avoided getting identifi ed as speaking it by their friends, and by looking
at the example above, it may be possible to see why. Both this apposite
stylisation as well as the interview reports suggest that these ethnic minority
and working-class students have learned very well what the value is of
Standard Dutch on the offi cial market, but also what its consequent low(er)
value or unappealing character is for them in non-offi cial personal territories,
given their own current educational track and related future job
careers, where academic or Standard Dutch does not play a major role (cf.
Bezemer & Kroon (2008) for an overview of studies focusing on standard
language in multicultural classrooms).
The posh quality of Standard Dutch did not mean however, that students
such as Mourad and his friends embraced the local vernacular
(namely Antwerp dialect) on the rebound. Quite the opposite, since especially
for ethnic minority students, Antwerp dialect generally evoked
images of racism and stereotyping, which was undeniably nourished by
the fact that up to a third of the Antwerp population voted for the antiforeigner
extreme right at the time of my data collection. Consequently,
minority students tried to steer clear of getting identifi ed as speaking
Antwerp dialect in a non-ironical way – as if it was (to be seen as) their
authentic voice – and they ridiculed those classmates who verged on
doing so. Because of this, their linguistic styling often contained a mixture
of dialectal and less dialectal features and so situated itself out of the reach
of common identifi cations as ‘Standard Dutch’ or ‘dialect’: teachers tended
to perceive their speech as ‘better Dutch’ than the dialect styling that many
white students produced, whereas it was not called Standard Dutch either.