‘Keileuk’: Kristel Doreleijers wins Language Book Prize with book about Brabant dialect

Exaggerate dialect to fit in. This remarkable language use of young people in Brabant was analyzed by linguist Kristel Doreleijers in her Tilburg PhD research. The public version Superbrabants of her dissertation has now been awarded the Language Book Prize 2026.

Kristel Doreleijers obtained her PhD in 2024 on the dialect use of young people in Brabant. She found that young people who do not speak a dialect at home still use Brabants to create an informal atmosphere among themselves or to express conviviality.

In doing so, they sin against certain language rules and even exaggerate to ‘sound Brabantian’. Doreleijers calls this hyper dialect in her dissertation Styling the Local: Hyperdialectisms and the Enregisterment of the Gender Suffix in the ‘New’ Dialect of North Brabant. Yet she does not reject these new forms of dialect use; According to her, it indicates that language and dialect are still very much alive.

With her public version of the dissertation Superbrabants: About youth language, New Kids and feeling at home in your dialect, Doreleijers won the Language Book Prize 2026 last Saturday, October 10, an annual award from the Society Our Language for the best public book on language. The prize was awarded in the radio program De Taalstaat on NPO Radio 1.

‘Great fun to read’, says the jury of the Language Book Prize about the book in which, according to its research into youth language, is presented ’thoroughly and freshly’. The book also shows that language is ‘alive and kicking and endlessly fascinating.’

Doreleijers is now working at the Meertens Instituut as a postdoctoral researcher on youth language and language variation on social media. She thinks the prize is a great recognition for her work in making language research accessible to a wide audience.

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