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John Benjamins Publishing Company

This is a contribution from The Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging. Perspectives from the margins. Edited by Leonie Cornips and Vincent de Rooij. © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com

Chapter 4

Cité Duits A polyethnic miners’ variety Peter Auer and Leonie Cornips

Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg / Meertens Instituut (KNAW) & 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

1. Introduction In the late 1930s and 1940s, locally born children of immigrant coal miners in Tuinwijk, a neighborhood in the village of Eisden in the Belgian province of Limburg, developed a way of speaking among themselves which they later labelled Cité Duits. Cité refers to a miners’ housing neighborhood and Duits is the Dutch word for German. According to the memories of these children – who are now elderly men in their late 70s and 80s – they started to talk Duits to have ‘their own language in the streets’. Having become coal miners themselves, they continued to use what had developed into a sedimented variety as an in-group language throughout their lives when working underground as well as in their private lives. In this paper we want to show that Cité Duits is a hybrid variety resulting from combining elements of German, Belgian Dutch (henceforth: 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. It did not emerge out of communicative doi 10.1075/impact.45.04aue © 2018 John Benjamins Publishing Company

56

Peter Auer and Leonie Cornips

necessity (since Dutch and the Maasland dialect were available to make oneself understood), but (re)produces an in-group identity and expresses a sense of belonging. It is these linguistic processes of place-making and the linguistic expression of belonging which we will describe in this chapter. We elaborate on the historical conditions under which the immigrants and later their children from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds lived and were received in the local rural communities. We also link this sociolinguistic analysis to a first sketch of some of the most striking phonological and morphosyntactic properties of Cité Duits. 2. Historical context: A circulation of labor In the Belgian-Dutch-German borderland (today the Euregio Meuse-Rhine) four coalfields were situated close to each other in the early 20th century: the Campine (Dutch and Maasland dialect-speaking) and Liège (Walloon-speaking) areas in Belgium, the mining region north of Aachen in Germany, and the South Limburg basin in the Netherlands (Knotter 2012). In the Campine area six modern, large-scale mines were founded around 1902 but only started production after World War I. Map 1 shows their locations west of the river Meuse (Maas). They are, from west to east, Beringen, Zolder, Winterslag, Zwartberg, Waterschei in the neighborhood of Genk, and Eisden. (All of these mines were closed down between 1987 and 1992.) In this paper we will focus on Eisden which is located almost at the border with the Netherlands in the far east of Belgium. Specific housing and labor recruitment conditions triggered the processes of local identity formation, and as a result Cité Duits only emerged there. In all the northwest European mining regions (and beyond), recruitment of labor was a recurrent problem. The mining companies in the Belgian-Dutch-German border area therefore massively recruited migrants in addition to local and regional workers as well as commuters (Delbroek 2008; Knotter 2012). This is especially true for the mining industry in Eisden, due to its late foundation (exploitation of the mines only started in 1920) and its remote location far in the east of Belgium. However, as Knotter (2012) notes, the notion of ‘foreign labor’ must be treated with caution in the Meuse/Rhine area, as the national borders of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany are very close. From the East (Eschweiler east of Aachen in Germany) to the West (Beringen in Belgium), the distance is just 100 kilometres; from the North (Geleen in the Netherlands) to the South (Serain near Liège in Belgium) the distance is about 60 kilometres. In a straight line, the Dutch mining towns of Kerkrade and Geleen are about ten kilometres away from their German and Belgian counterparts Alsdorf and Eisden. Therefore, much border crossing

© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

Chapter 4. Cité Duits 57

Figure 1. Location of the mining industries in the Belgian-Dutch-German borderland (from Knotter 2012)

took place – not only across the Belgian-Dutch-German border but also between coal mines in the north of France and adjacent Belgian Wallonia. According to Knotter (2012), the recruitment of miners followed a hierarchical scheme, i.e. miners were preferentially recruited following steps (1) through (5) below: © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

58


1. recruitment from the mining district itself; 2. recruitment from other regions within the national boundaries (mining regions or not); 3. recruitment from other mining districts within what is now the Euregio Meuse-Rhine; 4. recruitment from mining districts (more or less nearby) outside what is now the Euregio; 5. recruitment of foreign labor migrants from countries further away. As Knotter (2012) notes, the Liège coal mines attracted many Dutch and dialectspeaking miners from Belgian Limburg (just north of Liège) and Belgian Brabant until the 1920s. They crossed a language border, coming from a Dutch- and dialect- into a French (Walloon)-speaking area. But because of the growth of the mining industry in Belgian Limburg (Campine) itself, migrant and commuting flows were redirected to the new mines there, i.e. French-speaking miners came to Dutch-speaking Limburg. Liège had to recruit more and more migrants from further away countries such as Poland (see next section). Something similar occurred in the Aachen district in Germany, although across a state border: before the First World War many Dutch miners were employed there, but with the expansion of Dutch mining after 1906, labor from the Netherlands had to be replaced by newly recruited labor from the (then) Austrian Empire and Italy (unskilled labor). In the 1920s the cross-border flow of labor reversed direction: the Dutch Limburg mines attracted many workers from Aachen because of hyperinflation in Germany, which made the Dutch guilder an attractive currency for cross-border workers. According to Knotter (2012), distances were as important as borders in interregional labor mobility. Therefore, the exchange of mining workers between southern Limburg (in the Netherlands) and the Aachen basin (in Germany) was restricted to the mining district in the eastern part of Southern Limburg (around the towns of Kerkrade and Heerlen); the exchange between the Belgian and Dutch Limburg mines affected only the western part of the Dutch Limburg mining district around Geleen and the Belgian Limburg mines around Eisden near the Dutch-Belgian border. But when the Belgian wages lost value because of the devaluation of the Belgian currency (the franc) in 1926, cross-border commuting from the Netherlands immediately came to a near standstill. After that, the mines in Belgian Eisden had to recruit more foreign workers from further-away countries than the Belgian mines in the western part of the Campine area, since the latter were less dependent on Dutch labor. They were able to recruit a sufficient number of workers from the surrounding countryside and from western Belgium.



3. The immigrants in the Campine mines, including Eisden In the Campine mines, the first specialized miners, engineers and clerks, and some of the investors, came from Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, which had a long tradition in mining. The local Flemish men gave up their traditional agricultural work only hesitantly and rather late (from the second half of the 1930s onward) because of the higher wages in the mining industry (Beyers 2008: 41). Shortage of local labor in the 1920s and 1930s was compensated for by recruiting miners of Eastern European origin, mainly ethnic Poles (Beyers 2008: 41). Table 1 shows the comparative numbers for the nationalities of underground laborers in the three Campine mines of Winterslag (1921–1925), Waterschei (1924–1925) and Eisden (1921–1923). It is interesting to note that in the early 1920s the number of Polish workers in Eisden was rather small; however, there were immigrants from many other countries, most of them with a Central-Eastern European background (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary); Eisden also counts the highest number of Italian immigrants at the time although the massive immigration of Italian workers only started after World War II in Belgium (see Table 4 below). Most immigrants came from countries that were part of the Habsburg Empire before World War I. (Note that the number of Dutch in Eisden is quite high due to the labor circulation in the border area (Section 2)). Table 1. Percentages of foreign labor working underground in the Eisden coal mine between 1923 and 1925 according to nationalities (Delbroek 2016: 110) Nationality Poles Dutch Italians Yugoslavian Czechoslovakian Germans Hungarian Austrian Other Total foreign Belgians

Winterslag

Waterschei

Eisden

number

%

number

%

number

%

30 21 12 7 3 1 5 3 9 91 77

18% 13% 7% 4% 2% 1% 3% 2% 5% 54% 46%

26 7 2 19 13 9 11 3 4 94 85

15% 4% 1% 11% 7% 5% 6% 2% 2% 53% 47%

12 20 20 20 4 3 5 8 7 99 77

7% 11% 11% 11% 2% 2% 3% 5% 4% 56% 44%

The composition of foreign labor in the entire Campine mines in 1926, 1927 and 1930 is presented in Table 2, revealing rapidly increasing percentages for ethnic Poles between 1926 and 1927, for Czechoslovakians, and Yugoslavians between © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

60 Peter Auer and Leonie Cornips

1927 and 1930 (Delbroek 2008: 85). Note the standstill of Dutch after 1926, as already mentioned above: Table 2. The nationality of foreign labor in Limburg, 1926–1927 and 1930 (Delbroek 2008: 85) Nationality Poles Dutch Italians Yugoslavian Czechoslovakian Germans Hungarians Austrians Other total foreign labor Belgians Total

1926

1927

1930

number

%

number

%

number

%

846 299 239 278 304 25 241 208 213 2,653 10,070 12,723

32% 11% 9% 10% 11% 1% 9% 8% 8% 21% 79% 100%

2,099 73 347 436 442 53 212 178 642 4,482 16,249 20,731

47% 2% 8% 10% 10% 1% 5% 4% 14% 22% 78% 100%

2,451 331 472 1,086 1,642 285 469 237 144 7,117 15,828 22,945

34% 5% 7% 15% 23% 4% 7% 3% 2% 31% 69% 100%

The Poles who arrived in the latter half of the 1920s in the Campine mining area came directly from Poland, from the Ruhr mining region or from the mines in northern France (Beyers 2008: 41). The so-called Ruhr-Polen were mostly qualified workers. They, or their parents, had settled in the German Ruhr area in an earlier phase of migration from the overpopulated rural areas of Eastelbia (Klessman 1986: 336). Between 1870 and 1914, approximately 300,000 ‘Poles’ migrated to the Ruhr (McCook 2006: 119). After the turn of the century, one third of all men in the coal mines in the Ruhrgebiet were Eastern European immigrants. These men were called Poles regardless of their ethnic origin (Klessman 1986: 336). Although they possessed German citizenship they were framed as migrants in the German Reich and discriminated against politically (Klessman 1986: 335). Their integration was fraught with problems (McCook 2006: 121). During the French occupation of the Ruhrgebiet after the First World War, the Ruhr-Poles were suspected of collaborating with the French and discrimination increased. Between the wars, two thirds of these Ruhr-Poles chose to emigrate to France, Belgium or the Netherlands for both economical and political reasons or to return to Poland. Many of them belonged to the second and third generation, and many of them took their families with them (Klessman 1986: 338).



The number of foreign laborers in the six coal mines differed considerably. The easternmost mines attracted the most foreign labor, with Eisden ranking on top, as shown in Table 3 for 1930 (note that in 1930 Dutch miners were no longer part of the foreign labor force in the Eisden mine). The total population of Eisden increased from 1,250 in 1920 to 6,077 in 1930 (Delbroek 2011: 182). Table 3. Percentage of foreign labor in the six Campine coal mines in 1930 (Delbroek 2008: 81–82) Foreign labor 1930 Coal mine

Relative location

%

Beringen Zolder* Winterslag Waterschei Zwartberg Eisden

west west west-east/Genk middle/Genk middle/Genk east

13.5 5.7 28.8 26.8 37.4 50

* The mine in Zolder started much later than the others.

After 1945, coal was considered to be central for the recovery of the Belgian industry. There were not enough Belgians willing to work in the mines, and so the Belgian state once more developed strategies to recruit miners. The first strategy was an agreement with the British and American forces to hand over 64,021 German prisoners of war to work in the mines. As another strategy, the Belgian government signed agreements with the British and Americans to recruit refugees of the war who had ended up in German camps. In 1947 and 1948, 7,100 Eastern European refugees, so-called displaced persons, were contracted for two years in the Campine mines. In Belgium as a whole, a total of 30,000 displaced persons were recruited, among them 9,000 Poles, 6,000 Balts, 9,000 Ukrainians and 6,000 persons of various nationalities (Delbroek 2016). Many of them returned to their countries of origin, however, or moved to the US or Canada after their first experiences in the Belgian mines (Beyers 2008). Finally, Italians arrived due to a bilateral agreement between Italy and Belgium in 1946, and they became the dominant migrant group: from 5,110 in 1947, their number increased to 16,126 in 1961 and to 22,016 in 1981 (Beyers 2008: 45). But many Italians also returned quickly or found other work. Table 4 shows the numbers of foreign laborers in the Belgian coal mining industry between 1946 and 1948:


62


Table 4. Foreign labor in the Belgian coal mining industry according to nationality, 1946–1948 (31 Dec.) (taken from Delbroek 2016) Nationality Free Germans Prisoners of war Spain French Dutch Hungarian Italian Poles Swiss Czechoslovakian Yugoslavian Balts North-Africans British Without nationality Other Total

1946

1947

1948

53 36,135 111 1,083 612 1,023 19,164 6,344 209 633 641 23 507 22 47 282 66,889

3,684 1 198 1,777 865 813 29,957 12,926 103 719 1,068 1,433 3,112 40 1,162 5,710 63,568

3,095 – 171 1,257 894 789 46,120 13,269 88 745 1,039 1,312 1,547 61 545 5,118 76,050

Both Polish immigrants in the interwar period and Italians after the war brought over their families fairly soon. Consequently, Polish miners’ children became adults in the Campine area when the mining industry was in full production, from the 1930s to the 1950s, while the Italian miners’ children reached adulthood four decades later when the Limburg mines were in the final stages of decline (Beyers 2008: 38). 4. Social and ethnic conditions for the emergence of Cité Duits in Eisden/Tuinwijk The cité of Eisden (which was called Tuinwijk = lit. ‘garden neighborhood’) stood out among the other coal mining sites in the Campine. Its special situation is very likely the reason why a variety such as Cité Duits emerged there and seems not to have emerged in the other mines. In Eisden as well as other Campine mining sites, the companies tried to attract and keep employees through the provision of housing within the mining towns (cité) and by funding sports clubs (particularly soccer) and cultural associations (Beyers 2008: 43). From 1910 onwards, so-called garden cities were built according to the English model, in which every house had electricity, running water and a garden. These new housing estates were relatively © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


isolated from the rural habitat of the established population. They enabled their inhabitants to live on a small budget, to do some gardening, to keep some livestock, and to live together with other mining families. Unmarried people lived mostly in barracks or as private tenants (Klessmann 1986: 344). What made Eisden special, though, was its isolated location compared to the other mines. In 1900, it was a small border village of some 500 inhabitants. To the east the canal and the river Meuse bordering the Netherlands cut it off. To the west it was cut off by a large uninhabited peat bog that later became a national park. This peat bog not only separated Eisden from other villages but also from the other mines further away to the west. Eisden’s peripheral geography was also experienced socially. Jan Kohlbacher, one of our informants and most likely the ‘inventor’ of the label Cité Duits, refers to an ‘island situation’: “The canal as a clear border, the clear-cut bordering of the new garden-city, with housing regulations and a mining company culture of its own, resulted in a cut-off property. The roads that led to the outside world carried the signs ‘Route privée – Eigen Weg’ (private road). This led not only to a mental but also a physical division between the village and the cité” (Kohlbacher 2012, our translation). 1 Tuinwijk’s isolation very likely contributed to the formation of a densely structured in-group. In addition, Eisden housed the highest proportion of immigrants of all Campine mines (see Table 1, § 3; Delbroek 2008: 87), and the composition of this foreign workforce was very mixed in terms of nationalities and languages. The mobility of the immigrants was high (as everywhere), but slightly lower than in the other mines, and even lower than that of the Belgians: In Eisden, 70.6 percent of the foreign workers quit after a year compared to 86.6 percent of the Belgians, whereas in Winterslag and Beringen 77.4 percent of the immigrants left the company within a year compared to 67.9 percent of the Belgians (Delbroek 2008: 87). In addition, the foreign workers were not separated in Eisden according to nationalities. In other mining towns, newly arrived immigrants were settled in one particular segment of the neighborhood in which other workers of the same ethnic background already lived, with ethnic segregation as a result. In Winterslag, for instance, ethnicity was deliberately used as a selection criterion for housing. Moreover, in the entire Campine, with the exception of Eisden, Flemish miners who worked in the lowest ranks distanced themselves considerably from both the

1. “Waarmee ze in feite gericht een eilandsituatie schiepen. Het kanaal als duidelijke grens, de duidelijke aflijning van de nieuwe tuinstad, met een woonreglement en een eigen bedrijfscultuur, zorgden een afgesloten geheel. Aan het begin van de wegen die van de buitenwereld naar de woonkern leidden, stonden duidelijke borden: Route privée -Eigen Weg. Men kreeg dus niet alleen een mentale, maar ook een materiële afscheiding tussen het Dorp en de Cité.”



immigrants and the French-speaking Belgian staff, supported by Catholic and pro-Flemish figures of authority (Beyers 2008: 46). In Eisden, however, housing was not based on ethnicity/nationality but on the number of children per family. Thus, families with different migration trajectories, nationalities and language backgrounds but with an equal number of children came to live together in the same street (Delbroek 2008). Kohlbacher comments on this as follows: “In Eisden, it was certainly not the case that people of the same nationality lived together in one street. I was born in Paul Lambertlaan in Eisden. Some sixty families lived in this street counting at least twelve different nationalities, including Walloons and Flemish. Not included in this count are the three guesthouses with more than a hundred single men.” 2 Jef Hay, another of our informants, writes: “In our street lived one Flemish family only, the others were all immigrants: Polish, Slovenes, a Dutch, and my father and mother were Hungarian Swabians” (our translation from Cité Duits). 3 For the boys growing up in Tuinwijk, playing in the street was the main group-building activity. Girls were not involved in outdoor play (Styck et al. 2008), but shared a sense of community with others from their neighborhood, for instance with the other girls they walked to school with (Beyers 2008). According to Beyers (2008), schools and sports clubs also contributed to bridging ethnic boundaries, especially the football clubs that were financed by the mines. These clubs became the most ethnically diverse associations in the mining region. While ethnic boundaries were erased in the club, its young members developed a ‘we’-feeling when playing against other clubs, particularly from the villages, including the village of Eisden. Our informants told us that they spoke Cité Duits among themselves when playing against the boys from the village.

2. Original Dutch text by Kohlbacher (2012): “Er is geen sprake van straten waar alleen mensen met dezelfde nationaliteit woonden. Ik werd geboren in de Eisdense Paul Lambertlaan. We groeiden op in een straat waar een zestigtal gezinnen woonden. En daar telden we minstens 12 verschillende nationaliteiten, Walen en Vlamingen inbegrepen. Met drie logementhuizen waarin nog eens meer dan 100 alleenstaanden verbleven, die we niet in deze optelling meenamen.” 3. Original Cité Duits text: “Bei uns in dè Strasse hat nur ein Flamische Familie gewohnt, die andere ware allemaal Auslendas: Pollakken, Slovenas, ein Hollenda, mein Fatta un Mutta ware Ungarische Schwaben.” Note that “Schwaben” does not refer to speakers of the Swabian dialect of German, but “Germans” in general.



5. The local population’s attitudes towards the immigrants Beyers (2008: 38) emphasizes that immigrant settlements have to be analysed “in terms of the changing relationships and boundaries between two groups: the established population in the Limburg mining region and the migrant groups”. The Polish and other east/southeast European inter-war and the post-war Italian immigrants suffered from ethnic discrimination, racism and stigmatization on the part of the local, established population. From the locals’ perspective, coal miners of the inter-war period were linked to immorality, drinking, socialism and the French language (Delbroek 2008: 81). They were seen as living a rough life in the garden cities. They were disliked because of their way of living, high salaries, and socialist political ideas. For instance, Auguste Cool, the leader of the Belgian coal miners’ trade union, complained about the unrestrained and indecent behavior that he noticed among the coal miners during a train ride from Hasselt (the capital of Belgian Limburg) to Winterslag in a third class coach: “Just see how they behave, how they lie around, how they sit, how they stamp on the ground and fight. Listen to what they sing, what they say, what they whistle” 4 (quoted in Minten 2006: 400, our translation). He thought that only education in Flemish schools would be able to change this behavior and stop them from “stirring with their tongue in a muckheap of dirt”. 5 One saying among the locals was: “Only someone who killed his mother will go to the pit” (Minten 2006: 395). In their perception of the miners, the local population combined two stereotypes: that the Campine mines attracted mostly poorly educated laborers, and that the mines attracted immigrants. Therefore, miners were all poorly educated immigrants in their eyes. They themselves were Catholic and conservative. For them, the coal miners were responsible for what they considered a lowering of moral. In addition, they were afraid of the new political ideologies that the coal miners brought along: socialism and communism (Minten 2006: 400). The Catholic priest Leo van Winkel, writing under a pseudonym, compared coal miners to zombies in his novel entitled The Pit: “Pale, yellow, like plants that grow in the dark. As soon as they drink, they become animals” (our translation, from Minten 2006: 404). The teacher and priest of Zutendaal, Theo Vandebeeck, wrote: “They say that those coal heads are bad, rotten and spoiling, that the pit kills peoples’ hearts, the religion and 4. “Ziet dan eens hoe ze zich gedragen, hoe ze liggen, hoe ze zitten, hoe ze stampen en vechten. Luister dan eens wat ze zingen, wat ze zeggen, wat ze fluiten” (quoted in Minten 2006: 400). The biggest union, which happened to be Christian as well as Flemish nationalist, claimed that immigration would be superfluous if Flemish miners were treated better by French-speaking staff (Beyers 2008). 5. “Dat roeren met de tong in de mesthoop der vuiligheid” (quoted in Minten 2006: 400).



the faith of our Flemish laborers… They say that those miners earn a lot of money, but that they squander it in pubs and dancing halls, and return home empty-handed to mistreat their wives and children cruelly, and abandon religion and priests…. They say that morals are worsening in Eisden, Genck, Zolder and in Beeringen: there are laborers who show a gun when their poor fathers ask for their salary; there are girls who have been deflowered and spoiled, and chased out of their home by their weeping mothers.” 6 As working in the mines was a dirty but invisible work, many thought that the miners were accomplices of the devil since they did not face daylight (Minten 2006: 404). As Beyers notes (2008: 42): “Catholic leaders portrayed the mining industry as alien to the rural province and as spreading socialism and moral degeneration. Hence, eastern European newcomers were, despite being predominantly Catholic, portrayed as immoral and irreligious because they were miners.” The word kumpel, a loanword from the German Ruhrgebiet slang, where it simply means ‘miner’, was used as a derogative term in the surrounding villages. A mother would say to her child when wearing filthy clothes: ‘You are walking around like a kompel!’ (Kohlbacher 2012). Migrants’ sons faced strong hostility when dating a Flemish girl from a village (Beyers 2008). The head nun of the girls’ Flemish-speaking primary school in the 1930s had the following strict directive: in school the girls were allowed to walk in the middle of the hall only in order not to pollute the walls (Dorren 2013: 418). It was only after World War II that attitudes towards the eastern European coal miners changed drastically. They were no longer considered the representatives of a dark, francophone and anti-clerical power, but a model of courage and sacrifice. This was possible not least because new waves of immigrants (above all Italians) reached the country. The immigrants of the first wave now appeared to be well-integrated and industrious people, and negative feelings were re-directed against the new immigrants.

6. “Men zegt dat die koolkoppen slecht zijn, bedorven en bedervend; dat de koolput ’s menschen hart, den godsdienst en het geloof onzer vlaamsche werklieden doodt…Men zegt dat die koolputters veel geld verdienen, maar dat geld verbrassen in drankhuizen en danskoten, met leege handen naar huis weerkomen, vrouw en kinderen wreedaardig behandelen, godsdienst en priester verloochenen! (…) dat er daar werklieden zijn die de revolver toonen als de arme vader naar hun loon vraagt; dat daar meisjes zijn, onteerd en bedorven, die uit het ouderlijk huis door hun weenende moeders weggejaagd worden” (from Minten 2006: 404).



6. Sociolinguistic conditions for the emergence of Cité Duits in Eisden The first specialized miners, mining engineers and clerks came to Eisden from Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, which had a long tradition in mining (see above, § 3); the administration of the Eisden mines therefore remained largely French-speaking. The mining terminology used by the miners was French (van de Wijngaard & Crompvoets 1989), cf. terms such as: abatteur, ouvrier à veine, haveur, boiseur de havage, rappresteur of hayeur ‘coal hacker’, apprenti-abatteur and aide-abatteur ‘apprentice of coal hacker’, manoeuvers ‘workers’, fonceur de puits; ouvrier d’avaleresse ‘shaft hacker’ (Delbroek 2016). The word for wage was kezem, a nativized version of the French word quinzaine, referring to the custom that the wages were paid every two weeks (Delbroek 2016.). At that time, French not only provided the technical vocabulary in the mine, but was also one of the languages spoken in the garden city Tuinwijk. “‘God spoke French here’ said an old inhabitant of Eisden once” 7 (Kohlbacher 2012: 4). French was the common language among the higher staff, administrators and managing board of the mine. The street names in the cité were in French, too. But among themselves, most coal miners spoke some variety of German as a lingua franca (Dorren 2013: 417). For their children, the immigrants could choose between a French- and a Dutch-speaking primary school. The Soeurs de la Providence (‘Sisters of the Providence’) had started a French instruction primary school in 1912 but left in 1929, very likely due to growing resistance against education in French (Dorren 2013: 417). The directors of the mine suggested that the direction of the boys’ school should take care of the girls’ school as well, but the local priest made a strong plea for a board led by religious, Dutch-speaking staff. Hence, in 1932, the congregation of the ‘Little Nuns of St Joseph’ (Kleine Zusters van de H. Joseph) started a Dutch-speaking primary school for girls in the Eisden cité, bearing in mind that, according to the local priest, the cité was “a half godless centre with a population from everywhere, of all languages and religions” (our translation). 8 These nuns reported as follows about the opening day of their primary school, which demonstrates that the first generation of immigrants (i.e. the parents of our Cité Duits speakers) spoke German to a certain extent (Dorren 2013: 418):

7. “‘God sprak hier Frans’, zei ooit een oude Eisdenaar” (Kohlbacher 2012: 4). 8. “Een half goddeloos centrum met een bevolking uit alle gewesten, van alle talen en gods diensten” (Dorren 2013: 417).



Some hundred men and women with children crowded at the entrance of the school to enrol their children. They were Hungarians, Germans, Czechoslovakians, Yugoslavians, Italians, Flemish, Walloons, Polakken 9 and perhaps other nationalities, too. We filled in their index cards as well as we could between 8.30 until after 11.00 am. They [the parents] spoke, with the exception of some, an incomprehensible language, mutilated some French and German to make them themselves understood, and showed their papers written in Slavic, Hungarian or Polish. 10

According to the witness report by the nuns, there was support staff for Polish, Slovenian and Czech in the school, as 75% of the children did not understand “anything”. Yet they acquired French or Dutch in primary school quickly (Dorren 2013: 418). Regarding the role of German it should be kept in mind that most immigrants came from countries that had been part of the Habsburg Empire before World War I. Kohlbacher (2012) informs us: “One hoped to find foreign labor in the eastern and central European countries, the ones that lost the First World War; all those countries that were part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Countries that were broke financially and therefore good recruitment areas for future miners. The people who lived here had, thanks to their history, the German language in their ears, passively or actively. In countries like Germany or Austria, German was the language anyway. But in countries such as Silesia, Sudetenland, Slovenia, northern Italy and Hungary many German-speaking people lived as well. They had all lived and worked under a German-speaking bureaucracy or served in the army under German officers”. 11 The testimonies of the nuns show that the majority of the workers, originating from 9. The term Polakken is perhaps not intended in the derogatory sense here which the term has today, but just as an equivalent of Polen. 10. “Bij de schoolingang verdrongen zich een paar 100 mannen en vrouwen met hun kinderen om ze aan te geven. ’t Waren Hongaren, Duitschers, Tchecoslovakken, Joegoslaviers, Italianen, Vlamingen, Walen, Polakken en misschien nog van andere nationaliteiten. We hebben dan hun fiches ingevuld zoo goed we konden, van half 9 tot ruim 11 uur. Ze spraken, behoudens enkelen, een overstaanbare taal, radbraakten wat Fransch en Duitsch om zich toch maar te doen begrij pen, kwamen met hun papieren tevoorschijn in ’t Slavisch, Hongaarsch of Poolsch geschreven” (Dorren 2013: 418). 11. “Men hoopt ze te vinden in de Oost – en Centraal Europese landen. Laat mij ze de verliezers van de Eerste Wereldoorlog noemen. Al de landen die deel uit maakten van het Oostenrijks Hongaarse keizerrijk. Landen die politiek en economisch aan de grond zitten. En dus dankbare rekruteringsgebieden vormen. Het zijn mensen die door hun historisch verleden, actief of latent, het Duits in hun oren hebben. In landen als Oostenrijk of Duitsland was het Duits de taal. Maar in gebieden als Silezië, Sudeten, Slovenië, Noord Italië, Hongarije e.d. woonden ook vele Duitstaligen. Maar allen hebben ze geleefd onder een Duitstalige ambtenarij, gediend onder Duitstalige bevelen…” (Kohlbacher 2012).



Eastern Europe and Italy, spoke at least some German among themselves as a lingua franca due to their previous stays in Germany (Dorren 2013: 417). A substantial number of Polish workers did not come to Eisden directly, but via the Ruhrgebiet where a huge Polish-speaking group of miners had been living since the expansion of the German mining industry in the late 19th century, and were bilingual in Polish and German. Due to the economic crisis in Germany in the 1920s, some of them crossed the border and were hired in the Belgian mines. The German language continued to be present in Eisden after the German invasion and the occupation of Belgium in 1940, and played another role immediately after the war as German and German-speaking prisons of war were forced to work in the mines. The first convoy arrived in Eisden on, May 21, 1945 and the last one left in October 1946 (Delbroek 2016), when our Cité Duits speakers were at the age of puberty. After 1946, 3,865 Germans decided to stay, of whom 2,951 lived in Eisden (Delbroek 2008: 95). As German served as a lingua franca among the first-generation immigrants, the children could hear and learn it from their parents and their friends. Kohlbacher says: “What was the conversational language among all these nationalities? They did what they heard at home: German, broken German. My father always said about Leo [his brother] and myself: you speak the German of the street” 12 (Kohlbacher 2012). In sum, there was enough input for the children growing up in the cité to learn bits and pieces of German. However, the German they spoke among themselves was not standard German or any dialect of it (nor the vernacular of the Ruhr, as we will show below). What they called Duits (and their teachers and parents perceived as a mutilated form of German) was in fact a fusion of Dutch, German and the Maasland dialect. The fact that such a fused lect only developed in Eisden and not in the other mining cités can be explained by two particularities of the mining community there: its relative geographical and social isolation, and the multi-ethnic and multilingual composition of the work-force. The conscious distancing of the Flemish miners from the immigrants (Beyers 2008: 46) and the xenophobia of the local inhabitants, including the Catholic leaders and the unions (Minten 2006), supported the use of German as a lingua franca among first-generation immigrants and their children. While the adult immigrants needed a lingua franca, their children quickly became fluent in Dutch (or the Maasland dialect). For them, Cité Duits became a symbolic language for expressing group identity, but did not develop out of 12. Translated from the original Cité Duits text: “Wat war die konversatiesprache unter all die nationalitäten? / die haben, die haben gemacht wat sie zu hause gehört haben of Deutsch / gebrochenes Deutsch /mein Vater, mein Vater hat immer gesagt von Leo en mich: ihr spricht strassendeutsch.” Kohlbacher himself was born in a German-speaking (Austrian) family.



communicative necessity. The children who started to speak Cité Duits and the adult men they eventually became thereby gave social meaning to their neighborhood, which they experienced as their ‘home’ (Antonsich 2010; Yuval-Davis 2006). 7. Some linguistic characteristics of Cité Duits In this section we give a first, still fragmentary linguistic description of the speech of four respondents who were recorded several times in different constellations. The data discussed in this chapter form part of a larger pool of data (approximately four hours) consisting of interactions recorded on 13th, 14th and 18th March 2012 and on the 10th of October 2013, by the second author. The recordings took place in the living room of the coal miners museum in Eisden. For the purpose of this paper, the material used is about twenty minutes of speech of each informant. The recorder was placed in the middle of the table. The data were transcribed in ELAN by both authors, The respondents were raised with different home languages: Hungarian, Ukrainian, Austrian-German and Portuguese/Italian. At the time of the recording, they were in their late seventies. These speakers form no ‘natural’ ethnic group as their parents did not have the same national, ethnic or linguistic background. However, as locally born descendants of first-generation immigrants, they became part of a peer network from childhood on, a network which persisted when they started working in the mines, playing football or meeting in the cité. The linguistic variety that emerged among them is not ‘theirs’ through common family heritage; rather, they created it themselves by using linguistic features of a language (German) which was “not generally thought to belong to them”, as Rampton says in the case of “crossing”. The purpose was to create “alternative minority solidarities” (Rampton 1995: 294), to build social identity in opposition to ‘others’, who, according to their stories, were mainly the inhabitants of the village of Eisden (outside the cité), and most likely also the cité and school authorities as well as their parents. The linguistic features they (de)selected did not reflect a pre-existing social category but were used as a resource for self-positioning and constructing group membership in a (social) space. In this section, we describe some characteristics of Cité Duits as used by the above-mentioned four speakers that are either very frequent, such as the use of (in) definite articles, or salient due to the contrast between German and Dutch, as in the case of word order in the verbal cluster and extraposition (Pecht 2013, 2015). A note of caution is necessary here, of course: we reconstruct Cité Duits from speakers who were almost 80 years old when they were recorded. At the same time we surmise that Cité Duits is a way of speaking that they and their peers developed © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


in their childhood, i.e. around 70–80 years ago (in the 1930s and 1940s), which over the decades became crystallized. Obviously, this process of sedimentation will have gone through various stages, and the emerging new variety may have changed during the adult phase of the speakers’ lives as well. All these developments remain hidden and can only be speculated upon. In particular, the relative amount of German, Maasland dialect and Dutch components of Cité Duits may have changed. It should also be kept in mind that Cité Duits is a male in-group variety which has been used exclusively by the miners. In everyday life, the dominant language of our informants has always been Dutch, which they also use with their wives and families. Since they have been retired for decades, the opportunities to speak Cité Duits have diminished more and more. In addition, many of the former miners have moved away from Eisden or are deceased in the meantime, i.e. the number of persons with whom Cité Duits can be spoken has diminished vastly. Cité Duits is definitely moribund. Our informants seldom use it these days, although they enjoyed speaking it on the occasion of the get-togethers organized by us, to reminisce about their working life as coal miners. As in all cases of language obsolescence (cf., e.g., Dorian (ed.) 1989), structural changes due to this obsolescence cannot be excluded. Despite these caveats, there is strong evidence in present-day Cité Duits that its structures are highly dissimilar from the code-mixing patterns we know from the literature on bilingualism (cf. Muysken 2000). It is therefore unlikely that Cité Duits emerged from code-mixing, which, disregarding spill-over effects, should be either of the insertional or alternational type. In both cases, stretches of talk in one and in the other language can be delimited rather strictly from each other. This, however, is not the case in Cité Duits. Take, for instance, the following utterance from our corpus: (1) /has du də gro:sə tɔnə gəhat/ Have2sg you thedet.def bigadj ton(s)N hadparticiple ‘did you have the big casks(s)?’

In the relevant contact languages German, Dutch and Limburg (Belgium), i.e. Maasland Dialect, 13 the equivalent question would be (std.G = standard German, std. D = standard Dutch, MD = Maasland Dialect):

13. With thanks to Ton van Wijngaarden.


72


(2) a.

std.G b. std.D c. MD

/has(t) du di gro:sə tɔnə gəha:pt/ Hast du die grosse Tonne gehabt? /had je də χro:tə tonə χeha:t/ Had je de grote tonnen gehad? /hœbs du də ɣru:tǝ tonǝ ɣeha:t/ Höbs doe de groeëte tónne gehad?

The utterance in (1) has many characteristics of German (2a); the auxiliary has(t) and the second person pronoun du are entirely German; the noun can be German (then in the singular: Tonne) or Dutch/Maasland dialect (then in the plural: tonnen (2b, c)). The definite article de, on the other hand, is Dutch/Maasland dialect (2b, c). Contrary to the German article in (2a), it does not distinguish between singular and plural (see below). In the case of the verbal participle, there is word-internal mixture: the participle prefix ge- in (1) is realized according to German phonology in (2a), i.e. /g/ in the syllable onset as a stop, not as a velar (2c) or uvular (2b) fricative, but the stem lacks the coda /p/ of German (2a) (-hat instead of -habt) and therefore can be categorized as Dutch or Maasland dialect (2b, c). Even more complicated is the adjective /gro:sə/. The entire noun phrase /də gro:sə tɔnə/ can be read as Dutch and Maasland dialect (plural, but with German phonology) or German (singular, but internally mixed because of the Dutch/dialectal determiner). The following example of a somewhat more complex sentence shows the same intricate mixture: (3) Cité Duits /mə štɛl ma fo:r ja/ /dat dǝ gri:ç niç var gəve:zə/ but imagineIMP ptcl pref dm that det war not had been ‘but imagine that there had not been the war’ (4) a. standard northern 14 German: /abɐ štɛl diɐ ma(l) fo:ɐ ja/ /das dɐ kri:ç niç(t) gəve:zn vɛɐ/ aber stell Dir mal vor, ja, dass der Krieg nicht gewesen wär b. standard Dutch: /ma:r stɛl jǝ jǝ ma:r fo:r ja/ /dat dǝ o:rlo:x ɛr ni:t maar stel je je maar voor, ja, dat de oorlog er niet vas xəve:st/ was geweest

14. In the codified standard, the coda consonant in Krieg would be a velar stop. Syllable-final /R/ is usually vocalized, but several regional varieties of the standard also allow a rhotic or fricative realization.



c. Maasland Dialect: /mæ stɛl dix mær fœr jɒ/ /dat dn o:rlo:x (dr) ne:t meh stel dich mer väör, jao, dat d’n oeërlog neet ɣəvɛ:s vɒr/ gewaes waor

The noun for ‘war’ in (3) is taken from German (Krieg) (4a), realized in northern German phonology with a final fricative and initial stop (Dutch would also require a fricative phonologically, but use a different word stem). In the negation word /niç/ the final fricative is clearly German (4a), although the vowel sounds more Dutch (4b) than German. The verb for ‘imagine’ vorstellen/voorstellen/ väörstèllen in (3) is a particle verb in all three languages. The speaker pronounces the particle according to Dutch or German phonology; the verb stem is the same in all three varieties, but the initial cluster is realized according to German phonology (3a) (with a palatal sibilant before the stop). The discourse marker ja is the same in all three varieties and the modal particle ma could be both German or Dutch. These parts of the speaker’s utterance could therefore be said to be German, despite the many homophones in Dutch and/or Maasland dialect. For the remainder, this is not a possible interpretation, however. For instance, the initial connector ‘but’, realized as /mǝ/, seems closest to the Maasland dialect variant (/mæ/). The complementizer dat is clearly realized in Dutch or Maasland dialect, not in (standard) German. The determiner /dǝ/ is most likely Dutch. The syntax of the sentence shows various peculiarities. For instance, both German and the Maasland dialect require a reflexive pronoun with the verb vorstellen (lit. ‘to imagine oneself ’) of the form diɐ or dix, respectively, whereas Dutch would require the form jǝ. The speaker does not use a reflexive pronoun at all, however, and constructs the verb as non-reflexive. The most hybrid part of the utterance is however the verbal cluster /var gəve:zə/ ‘had been’. Word order is clearly Dutch, but the verb form /var/ as used by the speaker neither conforms with German (which would require an umlaut, wär, to mark the conditional, war being the indicative form of the preterite) nor with Dutch (vas); it is either Maasland dialect (/vɒr/) with a phonological adaptation to Dutch/German, or a mixture of Dutch and German. The participle form, in turn, is close to German and Maasland dialect but does not quite conform to either: the deletion of final /n/ is Dutch, the stop realization of the initial /g/ is German. Now, as we want to argue that this mixture is not an ad hoc phenomenon but has become sedimented, i.e. has turned into a variety of its own, it is crucial to show that specific structures in Cité Duits are recurrently or even regularly realized in the German, Dutch or Maasland dialect way. A full analysis still needs to be done, but we present here some first results.


74


7.1

Phonological characteristics

One of the important phonological characteristics of Cité Duits is the realization of the West Germanic stops /t, p, k/, which underwent fricativization according to Grimm’s Law in standard German and its more southern dialects but not in (standard) Dutch. West Germanic /k/ is particularly important as the Maasland dialect area, to which Eisden belongs (see Goossens 1965), is part of a large transition area between northern/western stop and southern/eastern fricative realization in non-initial position (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Map of Southern Low Franconian (from Goossens 1965)

The Central Limburg dialects (which include the Maasland dialect) are south of the Benrath line (see line Nr 2) which separates the southern final k > x shift from northern retention (as in ich ~ ik ‘I’, etc.), but northwest of the Uerdingen line (see line Nr 1) which refers to the southeast medial k > x shift (as in machen ~ maken ‘to make’, etc.). However, even though the Benrath line is north of central Limburg, there is lexical variation in the dialect, and not all instances of final /k/ are realized as fricatives. Here are some examples of the treatment of non-initial /k/ in German, Limburg dialect 15 and Dutch:

15. Here according to the Maastricht dialect.



(5) a. b. c. d. e. f. h. i. j.

G G G G G G G G G

/iç/ ‘I’ /maxǝn/ ‘to make’ /raiç/ ‘rich’ /aux/ ‘also’ /kıɐçǝ/ ‘church’ /bǝzu:xǝn/ ‘to visit’ /zaxǝ/ ‘thing’ /ri:çǝn/ ‘to smell’ /rɛçnǝn/ ‘to reckon’

~ LimD /ix/ : D /ma:kǝ/ : D /rɛik/ ~ LimD /ɔ:x/ : D /kerk/ : D /bǝzu:kǝ/ : D /za:k/ : D /rǝykǝ/ : D/re:kǝnǝ/

: D /ik/ ~ LimD /ma:kǝ/ ~ LimD /ri:k/ : D /o:k/ ~ LimD /kɛ:rǝk/ ~ LimD /bǝzœ:kǝ/ ~ LimD /za:k/ ~ LimD /ry:kǝ/ ~ LimD /re:kǝnǝ/

In the case of West Germanic /t/ and /p/, corresponding with standard German /ts ~ s/ (as in Zeug ‘stuff, things’, besser ‘better’) and /pf ~ f/ (as in auf ‘on’, Dorf ‘village’, Pfanne ‘pan’), no shifts are found in the southern Low Franconian dialects, i.e. Limburg is in line with standard Dutch (which has tuig ‘stuff ’, beter ‘better’, op ‘on’, dorp ‘village’, pan ‘pan’). The four speakers produced 135 examples of medial or final /k/, 84% of which were pronounced as a fricative, 14% as a stop, and the rest (2%) were deleted. If the cases of word-final /k/ in which the Maasland dialect is in line with German are counted separately (these are the cases of ich/ik and auch/ook in our data set), the numbers increase slightly (87% of 115 examples), while they decrease for words in which the Central Limburg dialect is in line with standard Dutch (65%). 16 The lower percentage of fricative realization in these words is mainly due to the fact that other phonological features sometimes support their Dutch status (such as in boek ‘book’, boeks(k)es ‘bookPL/DIM’, werkelijk ‘really’). The speaker with an Austrian and the one with a Hungarian family background produced the highest amount of fricatives (100%), while the speaker with a Portuguese/Italian background and the one with a Ukrainian family background show somewhat lower values (90% and 73%, respectively). It should be noted that these numbers were counted over the running text. However, the speakers do not consistently use Cité Duits but occasionally switch into Dutch; in these cases, we of course find the Dutch stops. Some examples for code-switching are (Dutch utterances are italicized): 17

16. In the data set, these are German Kirche, -lich, -reich, machen, Sache, Buch, sicher, suchen corresponding to Dutch kerk, -lijk, -rijk, maken, zaak, boek, zeker, zoeken. 17. The first two are from the speaker with a Portuguese/Italian family background (L 10.811, 11.862), the third from the one with the Ukrainian family background.


76


(6) a.

und dae: conducteur 18 Neeles and, the main foreman Neeles ‘and Neeles, the main foreman’ der frag(t) gege mich he asked prep me ‘he asked me’ Lino set er wilt ge opzechter worde Lino said he want you foreman become ‘Lino, he said, do you want to become foreman’ Ik zex Neeles sag ich I say Neeles, say I ‘I say, Neeles, I say’ voordats du mich fragd walke zij de voorwaarde before you me ask which are the conditions ‘before you ask me what the conditions are’

b. hat er bevoorijk zweihundert frank gehat had he for example two hundred francs had ‘for example, he had had two hundred francs’ (seet er) krichs tweehonderdtwentig (says he) get two hundred and twenty ‘(he says) you’ll get two hundred and twenty’ maar ik ben porio:n 19 but I am foreman ‘but I am foreman’ wat normal vier fünfhundert war which normally four or five hundred was ‘which normally was four or five hundred’ c. (about a person in a photograph) das ist nicht meine mutter, das ist meine tante that is not my mother that is my aunt ‘that is not my mother that is my aunt’

18. “Grade supérieur dans la hierarchie des surveillants. Le conducteuer recoit les ordres de l’ingénieur, les commente et repartit entre les chef-porions et en surveille l’execution” (Defoin 1962). 19. “Surveillant d’un chantier ou d’une partie de chantier” (Defoin 1962, who traces back the etymology to Italian caporione ‘chef de bande’ via 16th c. French caporion (‘chef d‘escouade’).



dat kan niet. this can not ‘this cannot be.’ Ik zex jawel, dat is mijn tante, ‘I say, yes, that is my aunt,’

In all three cases, the speaker switches into Dutch for the utterance which contains the /k/; in the first case, ik zex, is probably a spill-over from the Dutch quotation in the previous line and concerns a parenthetical verbum dicendi (which is later repeated in Duits). In the second case, the main foreman is again quoted in Dutch, and the speaker’s subsequent Dutch utterance maar ik ben porio:n, although not marked by a verbum dicendi, is presented as the answer of the speaker in the reported situation by language choice. The final example ik zex is also a self-quotation from an episode which is presented as having taken place in Dutch. If these examples are not included in the counts, the number of fricative realizations goes up even further. The preference given by the speakers to fricative over stop realizations can be analyzed as a German or Maasland dialect component in Cité Duits. However, the fact that the values are high even for words in which the dialect has a stop suggests a German influence. Let us now look at the results for the words with West Germanic /t/ and /p/ (see Figure 3). In this case, the Maasland dialect uses the stops just like Dutch, while German has fricatives and affricates. Here, the results are strikingly simple: almost all initial and medial West Germanic /t/ and /p/ are realized in the ‘German’ way, i.e. they are fricativized (96% of 84 tokens in the case of /t/; 100% of the 5 tokens of /p/). With the exception of German zu ~ Dutch to ‘to’, these are all content words of varying frequency. 20 We get a completely different picture for word-final /t/, however. It mainly occurs in the high-frequency grammatical words dat ‘that’ and wat ‘what’, and is almost never realized as a fricative (n = 72, 99%), i.e. the opposite realization of initial/medial /t, p/. Word-final /p/ only occurs in the preposition German auf ~ Dutch op ‘on top of ’ (and derived forms such as drauf). Here, the dominant form is the fricative (n = 33, 72%); the six Dutch forms are all produced by one speaker, at least two of them in the context of switches into Dutch. In sum, the stop realizations in Cité Duits follow the German pattern, with a possible reinforcing influence from Maasland dialect in the case of auch/ich. There 20. The word types for /t/ found in the data were the numbers (containing zwei, zehn ~), ziehen, zu(rück), Zeit for initial position; Straße, groß, essen, heißen, müssen, wissen, Wasser, sitzen, besser, lassen, weiß, Wurzel, geschlossen for medial position. For /p/, the word types with /p/ were Pferd, laufen, schlafen.



is only one exception, i.e. word-final /t/ (see the overview in Figure 3). How can this be explained? Of course one might first of all think of Dutch and Maasland dialect influence; but why would the Dutch and Maasland dialect stops have been so influential in the case of word-final /t/ while they were not in the case of word-initial or medial /t/? One possible interpretation is the influence of Ruhrdeutsch as spoken by the Polish immigrants who came to Belgium via the Ruhr in the 1920s. Dat, wat and similar word-final /t/-realizations mainly in grammatical words (as in allet, et for German alles ‘all’, es ‘it’) are a stereotype of the Ruhr vernacular up to the present day. They are one of the lexicalized Low German substrate features still found in the vernacular. In a study of the use of this variable among Duisburg miners (of about the same age as our informants), Salewski (1998) found an average of 55.6% of final /t/ realizations in interview data (with a range between 8% and 100%). The language of Polish-origin Ruhr workers was only investigated once empirically, in a study by the ethnologist Himmelreich (1943). Her data, collected among first-generation Polish workers and their wives in Gelsenkirchen in the late 1930s, show about 35% Low German forms (in wat, dat, allet) in spontaneous speech. 21 Since the numbers are considerably higher in our data, this interpretation would imply a strong sedimentation effect which turned a variable feature into an almost categorical one. 100

deletion fricative stop

90 80 70 60

(%)

78

50 40 30 20 10 0

Wgerm /k/ in ich, auch

Wgerm /k/ Wgerm /p/ Wgerm /p/ Wgerm /t/ Wgerm /t/ others initial/medial final initial/medial final

Figure 3. Percentage of stop realization in West Germanic /k, p, t/ in four speakers of Cité Duits

21. The counts are based on her published transcripts B1, 1–3, on a small number of 43 cases.



7.2

(Morpho-)syntactic characteristics

7.2.1 The definite article The transcribed speech contains singular definite nouns (96 tokens), demonstrative nouns (13 tokens) and plural nouns (27 tokens). Although in theory the speakers could have selected case- and gender-marked forms of the definite article from German, i.e. der, die (/di:/), das, den, dem (case and three-way gender distinction), from Dutch, i.e. de, het/ət and de, d’ (before vowel) (no case and two-way gender distinction), or from the Maasland dialect, i.e. ət, de, den and d’ (no case, phonetically three-way gender distinction), 22 they produce the form de(r) 23 most often (84/96; 88%), followed by di (10/96; 10%). The forms het/ət (Dutch/Maasland dialect) and dat (Dutch/Maasland dialect) only occur once, while the forms das, den and dem are absent, signalling that case-marked German-like article forms are rare in Cité Duits. It seems that the Dutch-like form de(r) is the default determiner (Tsimpli & Hulk 2013: 128) in the sense of an unmarked form which is unspecified (or underspecified) for gender and case [+/− gender, +/− case]. Dutch, for instance, makes a binary distinction between common and neuter nouns. Singular, definite common nouns take the article de, and neuter nouns take the article het. The noun wasser ‘water’ (in (7)) is a neuter noun in Dutch and German, and we would therefore expect the article het/ət (Dutch, Maasland dialect) or das (German) with it. The speaker, however, produces wasser with the article de. (7) hee det ging mid de wasser miit hee that went with the water with

(Y 00:22:46.199)

Grammatical gender in Dutch is vulnerable: the neuter gender is rapidly lost in immigrants’ speech and does not reappear in subsequent generations of speakers who are born in the Netherlands and acquire Dutch from birth. An unmarked determiner is also well known in Dutch lexifier contact languages such as Negerhollands, Berbice Dutch, Afrikaans, Curaçaos-Dutch, Surinamese-Dutch and Indisch-Dutch (cf. Cornips & Hulk 2006 and references cited there). In some cases the use of the common definite article de with neuter nouns takes part in identity constructions (Cornips 2008). Self-repair in our speakers also proves that for them, de(r) is the default article, as illustrated in (8) and (9). In (8), the speaker first produces the Dutch/Maasland

22. We are grateful to Rob Belemans for providing information about the Maasland dialect varieties. 23. We consider the forms de [dǝ] and der [dɐ] to be phonetic variants.



dialect article het/ət selected by the neuter noun brood ‘bread’, but in his subsequent self-repair he replaces neuter et with də: (8) un ət brood bache se- bakken ze selber? də brood he and the bread bake they bake they themselves the bread uh (Y 00:06:55.021) ‘and the bread, they bake the bread themselves’

In (9), the noun foto ‘photo’ would be common in Dutch (no case) but neuter in German. Den foto, as produced first and then repaired, looks like a German masculine accusative, but as German foto is a neuter noun (unlike in Dutch) which would require the article form das, it is not a correct form in this language. Den foto also looks like Maasland dialect, where den is selected by a masculine noun beginning with a vowel; but again, this is clearly not the case. Whatever the reason the speaker may have had for selecting den, he self-corrects this form, and the repair is neither the German nor the Maasland dialect form, but də, unspecified for gender and case: (9) ich glaub ich hab dich den foto gege/ ich mein dat ich dich də I think I have you the photo give/ I mean that I you the foto hab gegeben gehat (L 641.22) photo have given had ‘I think I have given you the photo/ I mean I gave you the photo’

In addition to de(r) (/dǝ/), die (/di/) is used. First of all, die is the singular, demonstrative form of the article (n = 13). In addition, the four speakers taken together most often select the article die with plural nouns (21/27; 78%), here following the German pattern (nom/acc), and only in 22% de (6/27) as in Dutch and the Maasland dialect. Just like de(r), die is not marked for case when used as a demonstrative or a plural form. (10) dann gehen die gehen die (.) die die (.) de jungens gehen dann then go these go these these the boys go then un die maeidjes (J 00:09:01.936) and these girls ‘Then these boys go, and then these girls’

In sum, article use in Cité Duits shows hardly any morphological variation with respect to gender or case, but it does with respect to number. The forms of the article found regularly are: /də/ = singular, definite similar to the Dutch definite article /di/ = plural & demonstrative similar to the German plural article and the Dutch demonstrative article



7.2.2 The indefinite article The speakers can choose among the German forms ein, eine, einer, einem, einen, eines (case and three-way gender distinction), Dutch een (no case, no gender) and dialectal (e)ne, (e)nen (masc), een (fem), e(n) (neut) (no case, three-way gender distinction). The four speakers together produced 52 tokens of an indefinite article. The most frequent form is the article form e(i)n which was used in 83% (43/52) of all cases. 24 The articles e(i)ne/r were selected 6 times (6/52, 12%), e(i)nen/ e(i)nem two times and e(i)ne once (see (15) below). The utterance in (11) shows that the indefinite article e(i)n, which is part of all three contact varieties, is a default form, unspecified for case and gender. In this case, the noun neffe ‘nephew’ is a masculine noun in German, and after the preposition neben the dative case (einem) is expected in this language. The form e(i)n as actually used by the speaker resembles Dutch een, however; as in Dutch, it is used invariantly, i.e. unmarked for case and gender: (11) neben e(i)n naff von mich next to a nephew from me

(Y 00:03:21.483)

In (12), we would expect the article eine according to the German case and gender system, as selected by the feminine noun Wiese in the nominative. However, the speaker produces e(i)n: (12) dat is e(i)n große wiese that is a large meadow

(J 00:00:07.810)

In sum, in the great majority of cases the four speakers select the indefinite, singular article e(i)n and use it according to the Dutch pattern, i.e. unmarked for case and gender. 7.2.3 The possessive pronoun and the attributive adjective For the possessive pronouns (of which we only consider the singular forms, since they are most frequent), the speakers could once again choose out of an array of options, such as the case- and gender-marked German forms (e.g., for the first person, meine, meiner, meinen, meinem, meines ), the gender- but not case-marked forms of the Maasland dialect (for the first person: mene(n) (masc), men (fem), and me(n) (neut)) and the Dutch possessive article (e.g., for the first person, mijn), which shows no morphological variation for case and gender. The four speakers together produced 45 tokens; 43 of them (96%) were not inflected, i.e. the articles that

24. The numbers conflate monophthongal and diphthongal forms, as the two are phonetically hard to distinguish in our data and seem to shade into each other.


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are used are mein (German-like), mijn (Dutch-like), 25 men (dialect-like), or their respective forms in the second and third person. An inflected form (such as meine and meinem in the case of the first-person possessive pronoun) was used only once. In (13), the noun Frau ‘woman’ is feminine, and according to the German system we would expected seine ‘his’. However, sein ‘his’ (zijn in Dutch) is used. The same holds for (14) where we would expect deine ‘your’ according to German morphology: (13) ja! sein frou war ook yes! his wife was also

(Y 00:03:06.193)

(14) maar dann kommt dein mutter but then comes your mother

(J 00:12:16.128)

Taken together, the speakers show hardly any morphological variation in the possessive pronoun. The four speakers produced 55 tokens of an attributive adjective (including quantifiers such as veel ‘many’), as shown in Table 5. The numbers reveal a strong preference for invariant -e inflection in all three conditions (indefinite, definite, and plural). Table 5. Adjective inflection totalled over four speakers in three conditions Attributive adjective

N = 55

Indefinite

Definite (+/− article)

Plural

Zero

-e

Zero

-e

Zero

-e

4 .22

14 .78

1 .04

24 .96

1 .08

11 .92

18

25

12

The inflected form is again un(der)specified for gender and case, as indicated by the self-repair in (15) in which the speaker first produces the adjective ganz ‘entire’ without an inflection (which follows the pattern found in the Maasland dialect), but with an inflectional schwa (-e) in his immediate repetition (which here is the ending required in German): (15) eine ganz zimmere hej ganze zimmer (.) haus unter wasser an entire room hej entire room house filled with water (Y 00:09:24.974)

25. In Dutch, the possessive article shows no morphological variation for case and gender, but it inflects with an -e in plural condition, first person for neuter gender ons/onze ‘our’.



This pattern is almost that of Dutch adjectival inflection. There is only one difference: the -e inflection is absent (zero inflection) in Dutch if the noun is singular, indefinite and neuter. Although the singular indefinite condition is exactly the one in which the four speakers produce more zero-inflection than in the other conditions (.22 vs .04 and .08), they do not follow the Dutch gender pattern, as illustrated in (16). The indefinite noun chor/koor ‘choir’ is neuter in Dutch and is expected to select an adjective without inflection: bisantinisch and gut/goed. The speaker instead uses the default schwa ending. (Note that the pattern does not follow the German system either, as German would require an accusative -en suffix: guten): (16) ein ein ein bisantinische ein gute chor geha(b)t a a a Byzantine a good choir had

(J 00:04:01.683)

Summarizing the results so far, there is no indication that case and gender distinctions are marked on the singular and plural (in)definite determiner, possessive pronouns and attributive adjectives in Cité Duits. Rather, we have found the following forms, which are used by the four speakers with little intra- and inter-individual variation despite their different home languages: /də/~/dɐ/ = singular, definite di = plural & demonstrative ein = singular, indefinite mein = possessive pronoun without inflection -ə and sometimes zero as adjective inflection in indefinite context

These forms do not match the respective paradigms for case and gender in German, Dutch or Maasland dialect. For instance, singular and plural definite nouns in Dutch and the Maasland dialect select just one form, de, whereas Cité Duits shows a number distinction: də (sing) and di (pl). German has a plural form die and a singular indefinite form ein but those forms are marked for case (nominative/accusative) and in the case of the indefinite article also for gender (masculine/neuter). This is further evidence for a process of focusing having taken place. 7.3

Word order in the two-verb cluster

Word order in the verbal cluster is an interesting phenomenon to consider in this process of focusing since Dutch and the Maasland dialect differ from German in this respect, as illustrated in (17b) and (18b) (for the Maasland dialect, see Barbiers et al. 2008: 14). Dutch has variable word order in two-verb clusters, allowing both the finite verb and the past participle in clause-final position, whereas German only


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allows the finite verb in clause-final position, as illustrated by the ungrammatical example in (18b): (17) a. Dutch/Maasland dialect wanneer hij iemand gezien heeft b. German wenn der einen gesehen hat ‘when he someone seen has’ (18) a. Dutch/Maasland dialect wanneer hij iemand heeft gezien b. German *wenn der einen hat gesehen ‘when he s.  o. has seen’

This holds for both types of verbal clusters, namely (i) a verbal cluster containing a perfective or passive auxiliary combined with a past participle, as in (17)–(18), and (ii) a verbal cluster involving a modal or aspectual verb combined with an infinitive. The four speakers together produced 17 tokens of two-verb clusters, 8 perfective clusters and 9 modal clusters. With the exception of two tokens, all occurrences (88%) are ungrammatical in German, as in (19a/20a). Perfective verbal cluster: (19) a.

wie ich der fiets hab aufgehang how I the bike have lifted

n = 7

(Y 00:20:27.923)

b. (was) die dabei gemach haabe n = 1 was they in addition made have

(Y 00:08:37.149)

Modal/aspectual cluster: (20) a.

kan der auch in Pütt gehen arbeite can he also in the pit go work

n = 8

b. und dann (bij) en haus streichen gehn n = 1 go and then (in) a house paint

(J 00:20:53.516) (Y 00:19:33.631)

Word order in verbal clusters in Cité Duits seems to be constructed on the basis of the Dutch/Maasland pattern since most of the tokens follow a word order that is ungrammatical in German. Again, there is a high degree of convergence between the four speakers: the overwhelming majority of the tokens reveal the same word order, and only one speaker produced the two tokens shown in (19b) and (20b) that also conform with (standard) German word order. Note that only one of the two possible word orders in Dutch is chosen in most cases. The data can be compared with the two-cluster word order patterns found in a spontaneous speech corpus of 67 speakers in Heerlen (50 kilometres west of Belgian Limburg). Here the proportion of the word order in (18b) is higher (32.6%), and 50 out of 67 speakers (75%) use both word orders in the perfective cluster (Cornips 2009).



8. Conclusions Cité Duits, the variety whose emergence, structure and functions we have tried to analyse in a preliminary and tentative fashion in this chapter, can be called ‘peripheral’ in more than one way. First of all, it only developed and was spoken in the mining settlement (cité) of Eisden (Tuinwijk) located in the easternmost periphery of Belgium, which was also the easternmost mine of the Campine mining region. However, it should be kept in mind that, although peripheral in terms of the Belgium nation state, Eisden is located in a transnational industrial space. The mining industries of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany developed in the late 19th and early 20th century in close vicinity, and labor circulated more or less easily across borders, depending on the economic and political circumstances of the times. Therefore, the peripheral location of Eisden in Belgium at the same time facilitated the exchange of labor across the national borders. In Eisden, it was difficult to attract qualified miners from Belgium, and the mine was particularly dependent in ‘imported’ labor, which was one of the pre-conditions for the emergence of Cité Duits. More importantly, Cité Duits developed within a socially peripheral group of speakers. These were the children of immigrant laborers, mainly with an Eastern/ Southeastern European background. They were hired to come to Eisden directly or arrived via other mining sites, mainly in Germany or France. In Eisden, they lived together in the cité built for them by the mining company, but were cut off from the village of Eisden and the surrounding area, where the local Belgian population, mainly farmers, lived. While the ‘garden city’ of Tuinwijk provided many amenities – modern houses, sports clubs, schools – the newcomers remained a separate community, viewed with suspicion by the villagers as well as by the Belgian authorities (including the Catholic church). This created a feeling of isolation, but also enhanced place-making activities related to the cité which, importantly, crossed the borders of ethnic belonging of the various immigrant miners’ groups. Under these conditions, second-generation immigrant boys in the 1930s and 1940s developed a way of speaking ‘in the streets’ when playing together (which the girls were not allowed to do); over the decades it focussed and sedimented to become ‘their’ language, which they called (Cité) Duits (‘German’) without implying any kind of orientation toward Germany or the Germans. Rather, the variety became a symbol of their belonging to the cité; it became ‘their language’ in opposition to the Maasland dialect spoken by the village people in the surrounding countryside, but also to the school authorities (linked to Dutch/Flemish or French), the mining authorities (linked to French) and their parents (who spoke the languages of their country of origin). Its main input was German, the lingua franca their parents used; German could be used as a lingua franca as most of these first-generation © 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


immigrants either came from countries that had been part of the Habsburg Empire before 1918 (ethnic Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians, Italians from the northeast of Italy), or from the eastern parts of pre-1918 Germany (ethnic Poles and Masurians). Workers who had reached Eisden via the Ruhrgebiet were also fluent speakers of German. Of course, their children spoke Dutch at school, which soon became their dominant language. Cité Duits therefore also remained peripheral with respect to its domain of usage; it was only used among the boys and men, i.e. it was a genderlect, and more importantly, it was only used by those who worked in the mines, i.e. it was linked to the profession of the underground miner. Cité Duits therefore was a strict in-group language. With wives and families, and in all public contexts, Dutch (or a version of the local Maasland dialect) was used. The technical vocabulary of the mining industry was French, due to the Walloon companies that had set up the mines. As a professionally restricted in-group language, and as a genderlect, Cité Duits stopped being handed down when the mines closed down in the late 1980s at the latest. Most likely, it had already ceased to be acquired by young miners earlier, due to the fact that the ethnic composition of the labor force changed radically in the 1960s and 1970s, first through the hiring of Italian, and later Turkish men. Contrary to modern “multi-ethnolects” (Nortier & Svendsen 2015; Cornips & Nortier 2008), Cité Duits is not a variant of the language of the dominant society (i.e. not a variant of Dutch). Rather, it is a true hybrid variety in which structures of Dutch, (lingua franca) German and Maasland dialect have become amalgamated. Lingua franca German is likely to have developed some structural simplifications already at the time; an influence of the Ruhrdeutsch vernacular as spoken by the Poles there cannot be excluded either. On the basis of data from four of our informants, we have shown that the speakers show a remarkable degree of homogeneity in their speech; this means that they have as a community of practice recurrently selected certain features out of the “feature pool” provided by Dutch, German and varieties of these languages. Through this recurrence, their way of speaking became increasingly focused, which finally gave it the status of a variety.

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