Standardizing and destandardizing practices at a Flemish secondary school : a sociolinguistic ethnographic perspective on Flemish pupils’ speech practices

For a couple of decades now, in Flanders, the functional elaboration of what is generally called tussentaal, i.e. mesolectal language use situated in between (‘tussen’) acrolectal Standard Dutch and basilectal Flemish dialects, has caused increasing concern about the position of Standard Dutch relative to other recognized ways of speaking. This has provoked intense debate about the proper characterization of this evolution. This paper focuses on the daily language practices and overt attitudes of six girls at a Flemish secondary school to illustrate that it is relatively easy to find evidence that suggests this evolution is properly characterized as a type of destandardization. Yet by zooming in on the covert SLI-influenced language attitudes of the girls, I will argue that a close ethnographic study of daily language use is able to go beyond the surface appearances of larger-scale ideologies and can demonstrate the continuing influence of standardization. Sociolinguistic ethnography may therefore have a vital role to play in the ongoing debate about language variation in Flanders

Total Rarita-Schwinger operators in Clifford analysis

Rarita-Schwinger operators in Clifford analysis can be realized as first-order differential operators acting on functions f(x, u) taking values in the vector space of homogeneous monogenic polynomials. In this paper, the Scasimir operator for the orthosymplectic Lie superalgebra will be used to construct an invariant operator which acts on the full space of functions in two vector variables and therefore has more invariance properties. Also the fundamental solution for this operator will be constructed

GINI DP 10: Who Reaps the Benefits? The social distribution of public childcare in Sweden and Flanders

The main goal of this paper is to unravel the social distribution of childcare policies: who benefi ts from government investment on public childcare? If childcare policies are mainly used by those already working, and (scarce) budgetary resources thus end up with the higher income brackets, genuine concern arises about the distributional consequences of childcare policies on the one hand, and its effectiveness as an instrument to activate mothers with young children into the labour market on the other. Answering this question is a complex endeavour, because one has to simultaneously take into account the (possibly income-differentiated) tariff structure of childcare services and private childcare costs (parental fees), government expenditures (subsidies to childcare providers) and tax concessions. In this contribution, we develop a fi ne-grained analysis to reveal the distributional impact of public childcare for two countries (Flanders/Belgium and Sweden) already reaching the Barcelona targets for under 3s and interpret the results in a European perspective. We fi nd that, although both cases report high coverage rates, Sweden and Flanders have very different and even opposite distributional outcomes. Both examples provide us with valuable lessons on the redistributive nature of “new risk policies” and the effectiveness of childcare as an instrument of labour market activation.

'Ma leidster, oe moe 'k ik da doen?': een onderzoek naar het (tussen)taalgebruik van kinderen in de jeugdbeweging

Hoewel over tussentaal, het Verkavelingsvlaams, het soapvlaams of de “oe-moe-‘k-ik-da-doen”-taal de laatste decennia al vele liters inkt gevloeid zijn, blijft er nog veel onduidelijkheid over het informeel gesproken Nederlands in Vlaanderen. Hoe ziet die tussentaal er precies uit? En wie spreekt ze? Kunnen we ervan uitgaan dat Vlamingen telkens duidelijk switchen van standaardtaal naar tussentaal wanneer ze in een informele situatie terechtkomen? Door een gebrek aan goede corpora blijven deze vragen voorlopig nog onbeantwoord. In een micro-sociolinguïstische studie naar het (tussen)¬taalgebruik van kinderen in de jeugdbeweging probeerden we een aantal hiaten in onze kennis van het Vlaamse taallandschap op te vullen. We vroegen ons af welke kenmerken van tussentaal de kinderen gebruiken, hoe vaak ze dat doen, in welke situaties en waarom