Project Dunglish
Lotte Tavecchio of the Vrije Universiteit (Free University) in Amsterdam is actually doing some Dunglish research for her Ph.D.: Project Dunglish (in Dutch). Her goal is to find out more about Dutch people’s written English by analysing a large body of works to produce “a corpus-based contrastive analysis of English and Dutch sentencing patterns”. She tells me she will be finished in 2008 at the latest.
If all goes well, part of her project will involve having Brits read a bunch of texts and determine whether they were written by Dutch people or not. I jokingly mentioned that I am 95% right on a daily basis at work, but then I have many Dutch clients. Her findings will hopefully establish better teaching methods for Dutch people, knowing precisely where Dunglish crops up. Being able to back all this up scientifically is the most interesting part.
November 26th, 2005 at 10:53 pm
Hm, I think step one would be to teach dutch people how to properly write *dutch* :-S
“Wand, daar gaad ut ook al vaak al mis……..”
November 27th, 2005 at 1:13 pm
That’s not what this site is about and you know it 🙂
November 27th, 2005 at 6:42 pm
*sigh* Jah.
December 1st, 2005 at 11:30 am
More from the Vrije Universiteit (‘Free University’ sounds wrong, it’s not gratis but libre!) :
De Taalvervuilingsaward (Language pollution-prijs)
About Dunglish words seeping into management jargon etc… interesting!
December 1st, 2005 at 1:02 pm
Tja libre, in French !
That’s how it’s translated on their site, so don’t look at me 🙂