Good morning everybody. We will tell you something about new media and the Dutch language.
Do you know this kind of posts on Facebook? For the international students: this should be about 3 sentences, but she made it one; there’s no interpunction et cetera. Well, we see these posts a lot.And that’s why we choose this subject. Do new media have any influence on the language skills of Dutch people? And do new media have any influence at the Dutch language?
Our first sub question is: what new media are used in The Netherlands? Well, first question: what are new media? Talking about new media we talk about the last twenty years. For example: the first textmessage was send in 1992, and Facebook exists since 8 years. More characteristics of new media are that they’re quick, old media are more slow. New media are open, old ones are more closed. And so there are more differences between old and new media. The new media we take along in our paper are: Facebook, Hyves, Twitter, LinkedIn, chat, Skype, WhatsApp, textmessages and e-mail.
Second question: what do we mean by the language skills of Dutch people? Knowing language skills means that you’re able to use a language in e good way. There are different language skills:verbal command of languagereading abilityand the ability to writeSo, that’s what we mean by language skills in our paper.
Well, we didn’t finish this sub question yet. So I can’t give factors why the Dutch language changed. But I can give you some examples of change. First is het Poldernederlands. This is a different way of pronouncing words. So will kijken be kaiken. Denk ook aan het bekende Blaaif baai maai. Another change in the past ten years, is that we use words from different languages. We used to borrow words from Greek, Latin, French or English. But nowadays we use also words from the Moroccan-Arabian, Turkish and Surinamese language.
Years ago there was a spoken language and a written language. You used the spoken language when you spoke to your friend or anyone else, and you used the written language when you wrote something down. In new media we see that people write what they used to say. They call it: the spoken written language. It’s informal. Another influence of the new media on the language, is ‘Het Korterlands’. It means that we shorten all our sentences and words. It’s like the post in the beginning of the presentation. When we want to say: ‘wait a minute’, we write W8 ff. The last influence on the language, is the use of smiley and emoticons. In the Dutch language we used only graphemes. Signs which stand for a sound, like letters. The smileys are ideograms, the signs stand for a thing. Ideograms are used in Chinese and numbers are ideograms as well.
Well, our last question, about the influence of new media on the language skills of the Dutch people. Here in Holland there haven’t been many studies about this influence, so we also used some studies of American and Australion researchers. Many studies pointed out that using new media has no influence on language skills, and if there seemed to be a connection, it was just a weak one. So there are researchers who say that it new media has some influence. According to them, using new media has a positive influence on reading ability, spelling ability and lexicon. On the other hand, the use of new media has a negative influence on the writing quality of lower educated people. So, over all, new media has no or just little influence on language skills. One of the researchers said it’s mainly about the transfer: people have to know when they can use new media language and when they don’t. However, the risk is that the rules of new media language and normal language are mixed, and that risk is the biggest when you’re lower educated.
This is the end of our presentation. Do you have any questions?
