ABSTRACT
Modern colloquial Standard Dutch has a number of variable features involving nonstandard inflection (e.g., verbal, adnominal, pronominal; involving features concerning gender, person, number, case) which appear to participate in ongoing processes of deflection. This study focusses on ten constructions, nine of which concern nonstandard inflection; the tenth concerns a case of lexical variation in the third-person singular reflexive pronoun. After a brief description of each variable phenomenon, an online survey on the evaluative and reported use of each phenomenon is introduced. Valid data were collected from 1,515 Dutch respondents, which were analysed quantitatively on three five-point evaluative scales. In addition, respondents ranked each nonstandard variant on a dialect-standard scale as well as on scales to assess how often they “believe” they themselves use a certain construction, and how often they “perceive” other speakers in their environment to use that construction.
The results show that the features are stratified in terms of evaluation: both self-reported personal use and the perceived use in the respondents’ environments. Analyses using both correlational and distance-based techniques were carried out in the attempt to unearth the coherence patterns among the variable phenomena, nine of which are related on several grammatical levels. The resulting patterns can only be interpreted along social-psychological lines, defying structural-linguistic explanations. Whereas internal grammatical factors do not appear to play a weighty role, the features’ perceived use in the respondents’ environments, their ratings on the dialect-standard scale, and various evaluative considerations have the greatest effect on the respondents’ reported own use of nonstandard inflectional variants in modern colloquial Dutch.
