Pidgin Antwerp

Cultural & Linguistic Research

Pidgin Antwerpen is a linguistic and cultural project developed in collaboration with the Red Star Line Museum.

The project explores how Dutch can be reimagined through the voices of people who learned it as adults, particularly those with migration backgrounds. It approaches language as something living and evolving, shaped by memory, identity, and lived experience across cultures.

Which words from your mother tongue do you miss when speaking Dutch? If you could change one grammatical rule in Dutch, what would it be? These conversations created space to reflect on what is lost, what is carried over, and what can be newly created when navigating multiple languages.

My Role

As part of the project, I conducted 10 in-depth interviews with Antwerpians, for whom Dutch is not mother tongue. Their reflections fed into the collective process of rethinking Dutch as a flexible and evolving language shaped by its users.

During the language councils, the Pidgin group collectively decided how this “New Dutch” should sound. Together, participants experimented with language, grammar, and vocabulary, shaping a shared and creative vision of Dutch. The process concluded with a public moment at the Red Star Line Museum, where visitors were invited to observe how these final linguistic decisions were made.

In this project, I worked as a Cultural & Linguistic Research Consultant, conducting interviews, documenting personal language experiences, and analyzing how multilingual speakers relate to Dutch in connection with their mother tongues.

This project reflects my commitment to inclusion, storytelling, and amplifying diverse voices. It is closely connected to my belief that language is a space where identity and belonging are constantly negotiated, and where migration experiences actively shape how communication evolves.