Enregistering Grammatical Gender: Indexing Brabantishness through Languagecultural Practices in Digital Tiles

Abstract

In the southern Dutch province of North Brabant, local dialect use is declining sharply. Dialect leveling and loss lead to convergence to standard Dutch, and simultaneously to divergence that is reflected in increasing variation, that is, hyperdialectisms. This can be clearly observed in morphosyntactic features such as the adnominal masculine gender suffix -e(n). The current study investigates the sociolinguistic enregisterment of this suffix in 336 multimodal “tiles” with Brabantish aphorisms and jokes on Instagram. Based on digital and interview data, it shows how linguistic structure, situated use, and metalinguistic awareness (i.e., Silverstein’s total linguistic fact) are constantly interrelated. It is argued that the gender suffix acquires indexical social meaning at the expense of grammatical function, as its (hyperdialectal) use becomes associated with and recognizable for a place-based identity (“Brabantishness”). This research offers insights into how this meaning-making process is enhanced by co-occurring linguistic and nonlinguistic resources in mediated “languagecultural” practices.