oa Key and the use of Moroccan function words in Dutch internet discourse

In the Dutch used by Moroccan heritage youth one often encounters Moroccan Arabic and Berber function words inserted in otherwise Dutch discourse. This article studies a subset of these function words within the internet forum chaima.nl, a forum geared towards adolescent girls and young women of Moroccan descent in the Netherlands and Flanders. It aims to show that one major function of the insertion of these function words is to key the utterance as (self-)ironic and not-too-serious.