Pronoun Mixing in Netherlandic Dutch Revisited Perception of ‘u’ and ‘jij’ Use by Pre-University Students

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Perception and Processing of Address Terms edited by Helen de Hoop and Gert-Jan Schoenmakers)

Prescriptive grammars of Netherlandic Dutch usually explicitly warn against mixing T- and V-pronouns. Although the prescriptive norm opposes mixing, pronoun mixing does occur, and its use can often be interpreted as strategic, in the sense that mixing pronouns might help to balance conflicting needs such as signaling respect and formality to the addressee on the one hand as well as expressing closeness on the other hand. This article explores the perception of pronoun mixing among high school students who were in the process of acquiring the norm. As part of a student science project, we asked students to categorize real-world examples of pronoun mixing that they themselves had gathered as a strategy or as a mistake. Based on the students’ responses, we extrapolated that the most acceptable forms of mixing were brief switches to V in a T-context to express humor or urgency and—if there was no clear default pronoun—that mixing was most acceptable (1) when the text was free of spelling errors and other signs of sloppiness, (2) when the mixing was intersentential, (3) when the number of switches was infrequent, and (4) when there was a clear division of tasks between the pronouns. As an offshoot of this student science project, we designed a brief follow-up survey to gain insight into domains and consensus and variation among the students’ perceptions of pronoun mixing. This follow-up survey revealed that if not explicitly asked, most students do not notice pronoun mixing. We asked students to rank four real-life examples of address pronoun mixing that they had gathered during the student science project. We expected that with respect to their perception of the mixing of address pronouns all students would rank examples of mixing in the same order. A primary result of this part of our exploration was that there were large individual differences in the perception of mixing and that there was variation in the ranking of examples among the students. Intersentential mixing yielded the most neutral evaluations by the students, but intrasentential mixing showed the most extreme evaluations. It was disliked most strongly by students who had a general dislike of mixing and liked best by students who appreciated mixing as a style. Briefly switching to V in contexts associated with the T-pronoun was perceived to be humorous by a quarter of the students, and half of the students perceived a switch to the petrified abbreviation AUB (‘if you-V please’) as expressing urgency.