Report of internship at the

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Report of internship at the Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur

Melissa Boven

S2530899

University of Groningen

MA Multilingualism

Supervisor on behalf of the degree programme: Dr. C.S. Gooskens

Supervisor on behalf of the organisation: Prof. dr. G.T. Jensma

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Introduction

Prior to this internship I had no real work experience, except for some part time jobs and work as a volunteer. I therefore decided that the opportunity to do an internship during my MA Multilingualism was very worthwhile, since I would be able to expand my network, become acquainted with a working environment and get to put an interesting internship on my CV that is otherwise not that elaborate yet.

I have always had an interest for languages in the broader sense of the word, and so I decided to study linguistics at the University of Groningen. During my BA, however, I found out that I was more interested in sociolinguistics than I was in neuro- or theoretical linguistics. The BA did only offer one course on the subject of language contact and language change, for the rest it did not feature anything related to sociolinguistics in the programme at all. After graduating my bachelor, I therefore decided to follow the MA programme Multilingualism, since it focuses on minority languages and sociolinguistics more than any of the other MA Linguistics programmes offered by the university. The fact that the MA programme was located in Leeuwarden made for an interesting, hands-on environment that I really needed and appreciated after the very theoretical BA programme.

During the first semester of the MA Multilingualism, I realised that I was interested in dialects and regional languages more than ‘big’ languages. This interest had been growing ever since I wrote my BA thesis on the Groningen language, a regional language I was not brought up in but still spoke quite decently and that I heard a lot around me. I therefore did not hesitate when I was approached by Prof. dr. G.T. Jensma to do an internship under his supervision for the Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur (Center Groningen Language and Culture) focusing on the regional language I was interested in.

This report is meant to inform the reader about said internship at the Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur that lasted from February 5th, 2018 until the end of May/beginning of June, 2018. During my internship I have reviewed the files from the Vroag & Antwoord (Question & Answer) project and I subsequently wrote a report on the database and gave a presentation on my findings. I have also organised a task for BA students of the programme Minorities and Multilingualism for their visit to the Dag van de Grunneger Toal (Day of the Groningen Language). These tasks will hereafter be described in full, but only once the organisation I was a part of has first been discussed. I will then evaluate my internship, including my own experiences, progress and the things I have learnt. Finally I will conclude this report with a short, overall reflection.

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The Organisation

The Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur was only recently established (January 1, 2018). It merged two previous and slightly similar organisations together. Below I will briefly discuss the past situation in which there were two distinct organisations, followed by a description of the newly founded organisation that is active today.

In the past: Bureau Groninger Taal en Cultuur and Huis van de Groninger Cultuur

The Bureau Groninger Taal en Cultuur (Bureau Groningen Language and Culture) was an organisation within the University of Groningen, with support from the Province of Groningen. Its main focus was research on the Groningen language, together with promoting the language and cultural heritage within the region. Its research includes among others the regionally well-known project that focused on public involvement: Vroag & Antwoord (Question and Answer).

The Huis van de Groninger Cultuur (House of the Groningen Culture), on the other hand, does not focus on research, but on the protection and preservation of the cultural heritage. According to the Huis van de Groninger Cultuur it is there “for everyone who is involved in maintaining, protecting, promoting, developing, distributing and researching the Groningen culture” (Huis van de Groninger Cultuur, n.d.). This is anything from the language to history and from customs to music. They organise events focusing on one of these aspects, mostly organised in the regional language itself. The Dag van de Grunneger Toal that I will write about in the Description of Tasks section is one of these events. The Huis van de Groninger Cultuur was situated in the Groninger Archieven (Groningen Archives).

Current situation: Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur

The above mentioned organisations have merged into a new organisation, named Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur. This was done for both practical and financial reasons, and to make cooperation between the organisations easier. The newly founded organisation is funded by both the University of Groningen and the Province of Groningen. It has been active since January 1 2018, but the shaping of the organisation as a functioning body that represents the Groningen language and identity is currently still taking place. The physical situation after the merge has remained the same. There are three employees (all with the title ‘consultant’) of the center working in the Groninger Archieven and from within the University of Groningen research is still being carried out under the guidance of Prof. dr. G.T. Jensma.

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The Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur wants to set up, research and work out joint projects in the field of Groningen language and culture, and the hope is that the merging will ensure a smooth cooperation with many fruitful future projects. For now, there is no joint website yet and the individual websites still function, even though they do report that a closer cooperation has started under a new name. The website www.webloug.nl currently functions as the overarching website.

Description of Tasks

For my internship I was assigned a main task, namely to come up with a project and apply for project funding, and a secondary, smaller task: constructing a task for BA students attending the Dag van de Grunneger Toal. However, after the Dag van de Grunneger Toal it became evident that there was too little time to apply for project funding. A new task was created, namely reviewing the files belonging to Vroag & Antwoord and writing a report on what was present in the database and what seemed to be missing, and most importantly: what could be done with it in the future?

Dag van de Grunneger Toal

For the Dag van de Grunneger Toal I needed to come up with an activity for BA2 and BA3 students Minorities & Multilingualism visiting the event. There needed to be two different activities, since the amount of hours that could be used for the activity was different among the two years. The second year students were only allowed to spend 4 to 5 hours on the task, seeing as they needed the remainder of the time to write a blog post about the event. The third year students, however, were expected to spend 20 hours on the activity per person.

Before the day itself, there were some technical issues with the tablets used for interviewing and the screen at the day where the videos needed to be shown on. However, since I started communicating about the activity early the technical issues could be resolved soon. I also arranged for a room to be made available for the students during the day, so that some of them could hold interviews in an area with little noise. I copied, printed and made everything ready for the day in the week before, so that there were no surprises on the day itself.

The activity for the second year students has been discussed and altered many times over the first five weeks of the internship. For me, the main goal of the activity was to be able to gather useful data for my master’s thesis. However, the activity needed to be useful for the Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur as well. This lead to a discussion about an activity

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carried out by volunteers at last year’s Google X event. During this activity visitors of that day were interviewed on camera about their Gronings, followed by a short test about their knowledge. I decided that a similar approach for this year’s Dag van de Grunneger Toal would be fun for both the students and visitors.

The constructing of the activity for the second year students itself was not that difficult. There needed to be set guidelines on how to conduct the interview, what needed to be on the consent form, etc. However, a week before the event it had become clear that if the data were to be used for a thesis, the method of interviewing needed to be scientifically justifiable. Therefore, in the final few days before I needed to upload the data to Nestor for the students, I needed to re-think the interview. I luckily got help with this from Dr N.H. Hilton and we decided on doing a Picture Naming Task with words that did not have Dutch cognates and had only one variant in Gronings. This turned out to be difficult, even with a dictionary in front of us. However, we managed to find ten decent nouns that were not cognate, but that did have multiple variants. The final interview, the manual I wrote for conducting the interviews, the consent form I wrote and the Picture Naming Task can be found in the attachments of this report.

During the day itself there were some technical issues with showing the videos made on tablets onto a screen, but these were resolved quickly. Not all students adhered to the guidelines that said that they needed at least 10 interviews per group. However, in the end there were 47 interviews. I had explained the activity beforehand during a lecture, but also on the morning itself to be able to answer questions if necessary.

The task for the second year students was easier and less stressful to come up with, since there were only four students interested in doing their activity on Gronings instead of Frisian. Since there is a Frisian equivalent of the task and the students need to be able to get graded evenly, the task was almost set beforehand.

The final task for the second year students existed of making a professional looking video about the meaning and etymology of words and sayings in Gronings. I had to explain this to the four students, of whom only three could attend the event, during their lecture. I showed them a video on Dutch as an example, and told them that if the video turns out to be really great, we could apply for a feature on Google’s endangeredlanguages.com. They were very enthusiastic and started searching for words immediately. I took them to the audio and video service of the university, where they got professional equipment for filming on the day itself. I explained to them that they needed to edit the video, do a voice-over, add subtitles,

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etc. They also had to make a consent form, but I sent them the one used for the second year students and told them to edit it in order to make it suitable for their activity.

During the day itself, the third year students needed no guidance at all. They worked very independently in a room that I had reserved for them and I only needed to check their progress every now and then. They did have some questions, but those were all questions about whether they were carrying their activity out right – which they were. Since they were well instructed, they did not need any guidance after the event. They divided their tasks evenly among each other, and knew what needed to happen and when the deadline was.

Vroag & Antwoord

The second part of my internship existed of reviewing the files from the large database that is Vroag & Antwoord. This database consists of 14 questionnaires, filled in by thousands of people. This project was already carried out in the 1980s as well, both under the guidance of Siemon Reker. I looked at what the files showed, and what all data meant. The files shared with me on Dropbox were big and there were a lot of double files, seemingly missing files, unfinished files, etc. During the review period I looked at what files existed and what was missing, and most importantly what could be done with the data for the new Woordwaark project from the University and the Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur.

It became evident that the data could easily be used to create interactive maps that show where they pronounce what word in what way. Since the lists were purely orthographic and very few people know how to spell in Gronings, judging who means what with each spelling remains a subjective matter. People with knowledge of the spelling would spell walking as “lopen”, which is the correct spelling in Gronings, however since spelling is not taught at schools most people would spell the language phonetically. The word for walking then becomes more similar to “loop’m”, “loopm”, “loop’n” or “loopn” – this is also what is sounds like when it is pronounced. So when someone writes, for example, “loop’m” do they mean that in their pronunciation they have a small pause after the p-sound? Or is it just their way of spelling and is the pronunciation exactly like that of someone who wrote “loopm” without the apostrophe? For the future it would be interesting to create a map that not only shows orthographic differences for each place, but one that also gives people the opportunity to record themselves pronouncing these words.

To make sure the entire province was covered in the questionnaires, I picked one that was closest in amount of respondents to the average and in Google maps I subsequently

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flagged all appearing villages/cities. In the attachments you can find the handout that I showed at my final briefing about the Vroag & Antwoord project.

Evaluation

Below I will evaluate my internship, starting with the relation to MA Courses, followed by the learning outcomes, knowledge and skills acquired and a short comment on the received supervision. I will conclude with describing my career goals.

Relation to MA Courses

Gronings is a regional language, but it is often called a dialect. Due to the decreasing amount of speakers, you could easily call it a minority language. It has no standardisation, perhaps only in writing – but since writing is not taught in schools, only a handful of people, mainly professional authors, will know how to write in it.

During the master we have had a lot of lessons on small languages and also about language ideologies, languages that are disappearing because of ‘bigger’ languages becoming the norm, etc. I think Gronings fits in with this as well. Many people do not teach their children the language, because they still believe that it would interfere with children’s ability to learn Dutch. The status that the language has also plays an important role, since for many people the language has a negative connotation.

Learning Outcomes

These were some of the learning outcomes that were expected of me before starting the internship:

 Be able to independently gather information for a research proposal;

 Be able to write a research proposal/funding application based on previous literature and information gathered;

 Understand how the process of submitting a research proposal works;

 Be able to successfully organise an event.

Since I did not write a research proposal or an application for funding, these are no longer relevant. Below I will discuss what I did learn instead.

Knowledge and Skills Acquired

I think I did especially well on designing and carrying out the activities for the bachelor students. Before the event I was very anxious, since I was told I needed to arrange the technical aspects, design the activities and do everything on my own. This scared me, since I had no prior experience in organising something entirely by myself. However, in the

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last week before the event it was clear that there was no need to become stressed. I had good contact with the employees of the Centrum Groninger Taal en Cultuur at the Groninger Archieven and the ICT staff that worked there. I had no problems instructing the students and everything was easy to arrange and manage. On the Friday before the event I had to finish certain things, like printing the consent forms, preparing the tablets, etc. These turned out to be easy tasks and I went to the day well-prepared.

As mentioned before there were some technological issues, but these were easy to resolve. The staff at the Groninger Archieven were all very friendly and easy to talk to. Since I had already scheduled a meeting on the Friday before the event, we already knew that there were some technical difficulties that needed to be resolved before Saturday. So when Saturday came and there were still some problems, there was a “Plan B” to switch to.

Because of the difficulties endured, the day itself started stressful. However, after a while I find out how to do everything and how to guide the students. Sometimes multiple groups came back at the same time to upload their videos, but since I had more tablets than groups I decided to just give them a new tablet every time they came back. This way, I could just upload the videos in my own pace and talk with other students and visitors at the same time.

Both after and during the day, I received compliments on how I carried out the task. This made me feel confident, and showed me that there was no need to be stressed or anxious. I am now aware that I am able to calmly construct and organise an activity or event.

I did find it difficult to focus on the files from Vroag & Antwoord every now and then, since reading the same files over and over and finding that things are incomplete or missing can become very tedious. In my opinion I did show that I can come up with new ideas to use (this) data in the future and that I can work with little guidance.

Received Supervision

Professor dr G.T. Jensma was very approachable. He was always available and kept ensuring me that if I needed to brainstorm, he would be willing to. The first few weeks I felt a bit out of my element, but afterwards things went smoothly. I did not speak with Dr. J. da Silveira Duarte after the first week, this is both due to me not contacting her again and not writing a research proposal but focusing on the files from Vroag & Antwoord instead.

Career Goals

I would love to stay active in the field of Groningen language and culture. However, I do realise that this is a niche in which not many people find work. Therefore, I am open to many

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job opportunities. I would preferably find work related to language policy making and language planning, or a job as a research assistant.

Conclusion

Overall I think I did well during my internship and I really enjoyed it. I think it gave me valuable experience in a field that is not well-known due to there not being many jobs that involve the language.

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References

Huis van de Groninger Cultuur. (n.d.). Over het Huis van de Groninger Cultuur.

Retrieved from: https://www.huisvandegroningercultuur.nl/informatie/over-het-huis-van-de-groninger-geschiedenis on 12-2-2018.

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Attachments

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Attachment 2 – Instructions (translated to English) for the students at the Dag van de Grunneger Toal

On Saturday the 17th of March you will visit the Dag van de Grunneger Toal (Day of the Groningen Language). During this day you will have to interview around 5 visitors of the event. This task will give you hands-on experience with fieldwork.

You will conduct the interviews on video. For this you will be provided with a tablet from the university. The interviews will be uploaded straight to a private YouTube channel, from which videos will be broadcast during the event. The interview itself will consist of two parts. The main interview will cover questions about the visitors’ backgrounds and their self-reported proficiency in Gronings, whereas the second part of the interview will be a short ‘quiz’ on the language to establish the participants’ actual proficiency. Each interview will last about ten minutes.

A manual with the exact questions that need to be asked will be put on Nestor. Since it is probable that not all visitors speak English, a Dutch version of the manual will be uploaded on Nestor as well. Make sure you bring both versions of the manual to the event, so you can interview participants in their preferred language. Since not all of you are proficient in Dutch, you do not have to work individually and you can form a group of two or three people with someone who does speak Dutch (or Gronings!). Copies of the consent form that needs to be filled out before the interview will be provided to you at the location.

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Attachment 3 – Interview (translated to English) for the students at the Dag van de Grunneger Toal

Personalia

1. What is your name? [First and last name of the interviewee]

2. What is your age? 3. Where were you born? 4. Where did you grow up? 5. Where do you live now?

The Groningen language

6. Do you speak Gronings?

[If YES: continue below with question 7]

[If NO: continue with question 17 below “Questions for non-Gronings speakers]

7. If you were to grade yourself from 1 to 10, how good is your Gronings according to yourself?

[For this you have to compare it to school grades]

8. Why do you give yourself this grade?

[If the answer is too short, you can briefly ask about whether it is because they may have a lack of (word)knowledge, problems with pronunciation, haven’t grown up with it, etc.]

9. Do you speak a lot of Gronings in your daily life? 9.1 Do you speak Gronings in your family? 9.2 (Do you speak Gronings) at work?

9.3 (Do you speak Gronings) in the supermarket?

9.4 (Do you speak Gronings) with the physician at the hospital? 9.5 (Do you speak Gronings) with strangers in the street?

Groningen people and identity

[The questions below can be difficult and may be answered in a short way. Try to elicitate a good answer, but keep in mind that the interviews should not be longer than 3 to 4 minutes.]

10. What do you think of the Groningen language?

[If the answer is really short, try elicitating a longer response. For example, if they call it beautiful, ask them why they call it that.]

11. Have you ever been ashamed of the language?

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12. Do you feel like a true Groninger? 12.1 For both YES and NO: Why?

13. What are the characteristics that make you a Groninger the most?

[This is a hard question, that is about character. If an answer is not about this, you can ask for their character traits that may be typical Gronings. Don’t dwell on it too long, since the participant is supposed to answer quick and short.]

Naming pictures and reading words

14. I will show you a paper with some images on the front and back. Could you name these images in Gronings?

[First do the front with six images and then don’t forget there is another side with 4 images! If the person does not understand the task, ask them to give the name of that what is on the image in Gronings. “What do you see here?”].

15. Can you quickly count to ten for me in Gronings?

16. Finally, could you read the words stuck to the back of the tablet out loud?

[The words are: tegenvallen, loat, vergreld, nuver, potje, dansen, Martinitoren.]

Questions for non-Gronings speakers

[The questions below are only for those who have answered question six with a no. These people do not speak Gronings.]

17. You don’t speak Gronings, but you are visiting the Day of the Groningen Language. Why?

18. Could you perhaps think of any words or expressions in Gronings? 19. What do you think of the Groningen language?

[If the answer is really short, try elicitating a longer response. If they call it beautiful, ask them why they call it that.]

20. Finally, could you read the words stuck to the back of the tablet out loud?

Report of internship at the