Author:

Abstract:

Over the past decades, both sociolinguists and Cognitive Linguists have shifted their attention to idiolects, individual differences and intra-speaker variation (e.g. Hernández-Campoy & Cutillas-Espinosa 2013; Barlow 2013). This paper aims to add to this trend by conducting a bottom-up analysis of the speech of twelve participants to the Dutch reality TV show "Expeditie Robinson" (known as “Survivor” in the Anglo-Saxon world). Based on manual transcriptions of three seasons of the show (35 hours of recordings), we build quantitative profiles tracking each participant's use of two features of Colloquial Belgian Dutch (an informal, substandard but supraregional variety of Dutch). The first feature, word-final t-deletion, is located below the level of awareness (e.g. nie(t) 'not'), the second feature concerns the use of the personal pronoun gij instead of jij ('you') and can be seen as located above the level of awareness. Relying on the speaker profiles, we monitor and compare the speakers' style-shifting across discourse situations. Specifically, we focus on register differences (contrasting informal and formal speech) and differences in group make-up (verifying the impact of the absence or presence of Netherlandic Dutch participants - who typically do not use Colloquial Belgian Dutch). Inferential statistical analyses of the individual speaker profiles reveal striking differences between the two linguistic markers. The most outspoken differences between the participants are found for group accommodation strategies in the use of the personal pronoun gij, ranging from no adaptation (e.g. Meredith, using 84% gij in dialogues without Netherlandic Dutch participants and 85.7% in dialogues with Netherlandic Dutch participants) to nearly complete accommodation (e.g. Geert, showing a drop from 94.1% use of gij in homogeneous dialogues to only 22.2% gij in heterogeneous conversations). Interestingly, these different levels of accommodation can be linked to the degree to which the participants are involved with strategic planning and voting schemes during the game: the more strategic the player, the more he or she will accommodate to the Dutch. As such, this paper demonstrates how a combination of bottom-up analyses of individual language use, quantitative statistical techniques and qualitative analysis of discourse extracts can reveal (deliberate) in situ identity creation by means of linguistic markers.