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New research on the history of nineteenth-century Flemish migration into the North of France shows ample evidence of a complex pattern of transfer procedures taking place between the source and target cultures, both via institutions such as newspapers, magazines and associations and via practices such as popular theatre, almanacs and songs. The strong local embedding of migrant communities within a specific urban setting, i.e. industrial cities (Roubaix, Tourcoing, Lille), as well as the strong integration policy of the target culture, explain how and why Flemish cultural items are transferred and undergo a process of formal and functional hybridisation with the available institutional, linguistic and discursive models of the target culture. The following paper examines one type of transferred items, i.e. Flemish language elements, that are given particular emphasis in popular songs constructed by Flemish second-generation migrants. The analysis of these songs aims to show how procedures such as codeswitching and codemixing are used by migrant singers in order to construct a new hybrid language that may escape both uniform rejection and assimilation by the target culture.
