Van akker tot park. Taalculturele place-making en marketing in de online taalpraktijken van twee Belgische voetbalclubs

Languagecultural research into language variation and stylization often focuses on the carnivalesque or parodic. In the context of football fan-engagement on social media, a praxis as playful as it is ‘serious’, we compare the linguistic practices of two professional Belgian football clubs, Club Brugge K.V. and RSC Anderlecht. Within a sociolinguistic framework of ‘staging language’, we analyze how both clubs enregister specific linguistic and cultural features in their marketing videos to portray a place-based identity and a club persona (De Boer vs De Mauve). In doing so, they are seeking to convey an authentic local ‘club DNA’ that is at the same time supralocally relatable and marketable. We argue how scaled language choice and use in a global setting mark a local opposition between the rural, provincial periphery of West Flanders and the urban, national center of Brussels. Through the particular entanglement of symbolized language, glocal place-making, political and commercial interests, visual online settings of ‘serious leisure’ prove to be rich sources for research into languageculture.