Sociolinguistic enregisterment through languagecultural practices

This chapter will explore the effects of the sociolinguistic enregisterment of Heerlen Dutch in the carnivalesque summer song Naar Talië/Naar Talia ‘To (I)taly’, performed and uploaded onto YouTube by a band called the Getske Boys. The Getske Boys is a group of three male performers who, by selecting a particular set of linguistic forms from dialect, Dutch, in-betweens, Italian and English, work to enregister these as local to Heerlen-Noord and the speech of the coal miners who once lived there. Their selection of specific co-occurring forms is based on perceived past patterns of co-occurrences: an experiential knowledge, accumulated over the years, of the indexical ties between linguistic forms, specific (groups of) people and a specific place.