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The Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging: Perspectives from the margins
Edited by Leonie Cornips and Vincent A. de Rooij
[IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society 45] 2018
► pp. 55–88

Chapter 4
Cité Duits

A polyethnic miners’ variety

| Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
| Maastricht University | Maastricht University

In the late 1930s and 1940s, locally born children of immigrant coal miners in Tuinwijk, a neighborhood in the village of Eisden in Belgian Limburg, developed a way of speaking among themselves which they later labelled Cité Duits. Having become coal miners themselves, they continued to use Cité Duits as an in-group language throughout their lives when working underground as well as in their private lives. We will show that Cité Duits is a hybrid variety resulting from combining elements of German, Belgian Dutch and the Maasland dialect spoken in Belgian Limburg through focusing and sedimentation. We argue that Cité Duits developed and continues to be employed as a symbolic language for expressing group identity

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Historical context: A circulation of labor
  • 3.The immigrants in the Campine mines, including Eisden
  • 4.Social and ethnic conditions for the emergence of Cité Duits in Eisden/Tuinwijk
  • 5.The local population’s attitudes towards the immigrants
  • 6.Sociolinguistic conditions for the emergence of Cité Duits in Eisden
  • 7.Some linguistic characteristics of Cité Duits
    • 7.1Phonological characteristics
    • 7.2(Morpho-)syntactic characteristics
      • 7.2.1The definite article
      • 7.2.2The indefinite article
      • 7.2.3The possessive pronoun and the attributive adjective
    • 7.3Word order in the two-verb cluster
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.45.04aue
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