Language Variation on Trend: The Social Meaning of Grammar in Youth Language Practices

This project studies Dutch youth language, specifically: to what extent do young people consciously make grammatical “mistakes” when shaping their own youth language? Can grammatical features carry social meaning(s)? And to what extent is grammar related to identity construction?

Young people are true innovators of language. They use language in creative and trendy ways—think of loanwords, self-invented abbreviations, or accents—and in doing so, they develop their own group norms and group identity. What has hardly been studied so far is the role of grammatical deviations—also called “anti-grammar”—in this process. Well-known examples in Dutch are the omission of articles and prepositions, such as in “ik ga stad” (“I go city”), or unusual sentence structures like “beter bestellen we pizza” (“better we order pizza”).

The project Language Variation on Trend: The Social Meaning of Grammar in Youth Language Practices examines how such grammatical Dutch language trends emerge, how they spread (for example via social media), and what social meanings they carry. The research addresses a fundamental question in sociolinguistics: are young people’s grammatical choices unconscious, as is often assumed, or do they use them strategically in shaping their identities?

Future-Oriented Language Education

The research combines different methods: classroom surveys, discourse analyses, experiments, and focus groups. The aim is not only to push the boundaries of sociolinguistic research on language variation and identity, but also to provide directly applicable insights for Dutch language education, aligned with the national curriculum reform. Together with teachers, Doreleijers is developing a teaching package on youth language, freely available and suitable for use in the upper levels of secondary education. In this way, the project contributes not only to scientific knowledge but also to future-oriented language education.

Project duration: October 1, 2025 – September 30, 2028