Postdoctoral researcher Melissa Schuring has been named one of the five laureates of the Eos Pipet 2026, the annual award presented by Eos Wetenschap and De Jonge Academie to the most promising young researcher in Flanders.
Vote for Melissa Schuring in the Eos Pipet People's Choice Award
Schuring studies how children and young people use language and how English influences Dutch. Through her PhD research, Project OMG, she challenged a widely held belief: young people use far less English than most adults assume.
As part of her research, she followed 26 children aged six to thirteen, collecting more than 114 hours of spontaneous conversations. By combining natural observations with interviews and role-play, she built one of the largest datasets of its kind. The findings were striking. In conversations with their peers, only seven per cent of sentences contained an English word. When speaking to adults, that figure dropped to just three per cent.
Her research also explains why young people are often perceived as speaking "so much English". Words such as cool, nice and awesome stand out because they are often emphasised and accompanied by expressive intonation or gestures. Rather than replacing Dutch, these words primarily serve as social markers that help young people express enthusiasm and strengthen group identity.
The impact of Schuring's work extends well beyond academia. Her findings have been discussed in the Flemish Parliament and inspired the children's activity book Expeditie jongerentaal (Youth Language Expedition), which encourages young readers to become language researchers themselves and discover the science behind everyday language.
Rather than focusing on the latest slang trends, Schuring's research sheds light on the broader processes behind language change and explores how young people use language to shape their identities and social relationships.
The winner of the Eos Pipet 2026 will be announced on 9 September. Alongside the jury prize, the public can also vote for a People's Choice Award.
Vote for Melissa Schuring in the Eos Pipet People's Choice Award
Bio
Melissa Schuring is a postdoctoral researcher in sociolinguistics at the Brussels Centre for Language Studies (BCLS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She obtained her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Linguistics and Literature from the University of Antwerp before completing her PhD at KU Leuven in 2024. Her doctoral research examined the influence of English on the Dutch spoken by children and young people in Belgium.
Her research focuses on youth language, language contact, anglicisms and language variation. She also develops innovative, child-friendly research methods to study language use and is committed to making linguistics accessible to wider audiences through initiatives such as the citizen science project Project OMG and the children's activity book Expeditie jongerentaal.