Jacomine Nortier, born in Kantens, the Netherlands, in 1957. Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam. Associate Professor of Dutch Language and Culture in Sociolinguistics, Language Contact, and Multilingualism at Utrecht University.
Fellow (1 September 2008 – 31 January 2009)
LANGUAGE CONTACT AND MULTILINGUALISM
During my stay at NIAS (autumn semester) I wrote a book about bilingualism in the Netherlands for a broad audience (politicians, educationalists, other people interested in bilingualism). The book contains of 15 chapters, organised in four parts. The first part is dedicated to language policy, from a European (Brussels), a national (Taalunie) and a regional (Leeuwarden, Enschede) perspective. The second part focuses on education: chapters about bilingual practices, second language acquisition, educational policy, deaf bilinguals in the educational system; and cognitive advantages of bilingualism. In the third part, language contact is central: what happens to languages when they are in contact: code-switching, borrowing, language genesis, youth languages. The last part gives impressions of bilingual speakers themselves through questionnaires that were distributed among them.