Yasmin Crombez

Yasmin Crombez is a FWO PhD fellow at VUB with an interest in (historical) sociolinguistics and contact linguistics. Her research focuses on the linguistic consequences for Flemings who emigrated to North America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Specifically, she investigates how early Flemish-Americans and later generations positioned themselves towards maintaining Dutch and acquiring English, and how English influenced the language use of Flemish-Americans. To do so, she compiled the Flemish-American Letters and Newspaper corpus which contains Flemish heritage community press and ego-documents such as personal letters, postcards and diaries.

Research Expertise: historical sociolinguistics, language contact, heritage language linguistics, Dutch, English

Research Methodology: qualitative discourse analysis, descriptive and inferential statistical analysis