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The Other Languages of the Netherlands
Today, multilingualism is a fact of life in all the world's large metropolitan conurbations. Globalisation, trade, migration, tourism, war and refugee crises have all contributed to the increased mobility of products and people - and of the languages and cultures they bring with them. In New York we find sizeable communities of immigrants who speak Spanish, Italian, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Chinese, Vietnamese and other Asian languages. In Jakarta there are speakers of many of the 300 different languages to be found in the Indonesian archipelago. In Moscow one may encounter speakers from the 176 recognised linguistic minorities within the former Soviet Empire. And in London today some 300 different languages are spoken, and 25% of its schoolchildren speak a language other than English at home.
Multilingualism is also a key characteristic of the history, culture and society of Europe, with about a hundred languages in active use today. The European Union (eu) is operating on the principle of Unity in Diversity, and in 2001 the European Year of Languages will celebrate the great linguistic diversity of the continent. The eu has adopted the 11 languages of its member states as its official languages, and uses two of these - English and French - as daily working languages. A further 40 to 45 languages - ranging from Basque in Spain and the Celtic languages in Brittany, Wales, Ireland and Scotland to Ladino in Italy, Macedonian in Greece, and Sami (Lapp) in North Scandinavia - are covered by the Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1998) of the Council of Europe. And, of course, there are the many languages of recent immigrant communities from outside the European Union, such as Turkish, Arabic and Chinese.
In the Netherlands today we find a similar situation, especially in the urban areas. Over the past 25 years there has been a rapid rise in immigration, and the presence of speakers of perhaps a hundred different languages is now an everyday reality. With a strong and open economy and society, the Netherlands attracts people from all over the world: not only nurses from Surinam and South Africa, call centre operators from France, football players from Africa and Latin America, and it specialists from Britain and the usa, but also teachers from Austria, Turkish businessmen, Columbian street
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel (detail). 1563. Panel, 114 × 155 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
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musicians and Kosovan refugees. In this new Babylon one can watch cable tv in the major European languages and buy newspapers in a variety of foreign languages ranging from Arabic to Swahili. All this makes for interesting patterns of multilingualism, bringing Dutch into contact with an ever widening range of other languages.
Below, I will first of all discuss the present situation of the various categories of languages and speakers we can distinguish. Secondly, I will consider what kind of language policy the Netherlands will need in order to meet the challenges and opportunities of multilingualism.
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The Dutch language
Dutch is the national language of the people of the Netherlands, and also one of the official languages of neighbouring Belgium and of the European Union. With a total of some 21 million speakers in the Netherlands and Flanders, Dutch ranks between number 35 and 40 in the linguistic top hundred of the world.
Dutch has a well-developed standard and is widely used as the common language in society and education, in politics and government, the courts, the churches, the media and publishing. The Dutch and the Flemish are actively working together to develop and promote their language, and have established a strong resource structure via the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie), which is responsible for the spelling, grammar, dictionaries and terminology of the language. The association Our Language (Onze Taal) offers an active and popular Language Advisory Service, and there is an ongoing, lively public debate concerning the recent rise of socalled ‘Polder-Dutch’ and other informal varieties of the language.
The Dutch constitution does not stipulate that Dutch is the official language. But the Netherlands has long operated a single language policy as the key to building up the Dutch Kingdom as a centralised nation state. Education is normally in Dutch, and throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, this policy was aimed at unidirectional assimilation of speakers of Frisian, Yiddish and the many different dialects of Dutch. More recently, the 300,000 Dutch colonials repatriated from Indonesia in the 1950s and the Mediterranean migrant workers (‘gastarbeiders’) of the 1960s faced strong assimilationist pressures to adopt standard Dutch as the common language.
Given the large numbers of Dutch speakers, the elaborate support structure that is available, and the great weight of the state behind it, the Amsterdam sociologist De Swaan predicts that the language will certainly survive. Leading linguists expect Dutch to thrive and develop in the coming century, amalgamating and incorporating influences from other languages, in particular from English. Needless to say, this will only happen if the Dutch continue to invest in the maintenance, promotion and development of their own language.
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Indigenous regional or minority languages
Apart from Dutch, the Netherlands today recognises five other languages - Frisian, Low Saxon, Limburgs, Yiddish and Romany - as indigenous regional or minority languages under the European Charter mentioned above, which the Netherlands, unlike its neighbour Belgium, has ratified. The recognition of Low Saxon (Nedersaksisch) in the eastern provinces and of Limburgs in the southeast was mostly symbolic: no resources have been allocated for their introduction in education or the media. As a symbol of regional pride, though, these two languages reflect the growing tendency of rural areas to identify themselves as different from the more dominant urban west of the country. Already, the province of Zeeland is clamouring for the recognition of its dialect as another indigenous regional language.
Amongst these five, Frisian (‘Frysk’), the nearest relative to English on the continent, holds a special position. As an official language in its home province of Fryslân, it is the common language of some 400,000 native speakers who produce a lively output of literature, theatre and films in Frisian. It is supported by an inventive language policy with good academic input, a clear presence on the world wide web, and a resource structure fostering the teaching and study of both language and culture. From the 1950s onwards, the Frisian language has gone through a process of increasing recognition, culminating in the Administrative Agreement of 1989 that defines the joint responsibility for Frisian of both the Dutch national government and the Frisian provincial administration. The Agreement was renewed in 2000 to take into account the many obligations stipulated in the European Charter.
The official status of Frisian provides considerable support. But it is a matter of what a former Dutch prime minister called the ‘narrow margins’, which are defined by the Dutch national government, in particular in education. Thus, for example, in secondary schools Frisian is only available as a subject like other foreign languages, and not as a daily contact language. Higher education as a path to economic success is available only in Dutch, and not in the rural areas where Frisian is spoken. Dutch continues to carry a higher prestige, and without Dutch one does not have good career prospects in the Netherlands. As a consequence, there is a significant brain drain away from Fryslân. The pattern traditionally has been for Frisians to migrate, often to Amsterdam, where they have gone over to Dutch, while sometimes retaining Frisian for use at home, with their family and friends and when they visit relatives back home in Fryslân. The Director of the European Central Bank, the Frisian Wim Duisenberg, is a good example.
Due to the various pressures that Dutch society brings to bear on Frisian, the future of this language gives some cause for concern. The fact is - and in this respect, as the Euromosaic survey of 1996 has shown, Frisian is typical of all the other linguistic minorities in Europe - there are no monolingual speakers of Frisian any more. However, with its large number of native speakers, Frisian is still well above the critical threshold for linguistic survival.
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European languages
Over the past 20 years, and especially after the abolition of the internal European borders in 1992 (Schengen Treaty), there has been a strong influx of fellow citizens of the European Union (eu). No overall figures are available, but the category of ‘Other non-Dutch people’ in the Netherlands numbered a total of 1.6 million people in 1997. This includes 143,000 immigrants from Southern Europe, with sizeable communities of Spanish (30,000), Portuguese (15,000), Italians (33,000) and Greeks (10,000) living in the Netherlands today.
There are no separate figures for European citizens from Great Britain, Germany, France or Scandinavia, nor for people from the European Economic Region. But clearly there are large numbers of English-speaking immigrants in the Netherlands today: chippies from Ireland, English nurses, museum directors and translators, American and British consultants working in the media and advertising, trade, transport and information technology, in the financial sector and in Dutch multinationals such as Unilever, Shell and Philips. As a result, in Amsterdam today speakers of English constitute the largest foreign community.
Many of these English-speaking migrants come to the Netherlands for economic and personal reasons. Neither the Europeans nor the Americans are obliged to take courses in Dutch, because - unlike the ethnic minorities discussed below - the new 1998 law on integration does not apply to them. Many of them therefore do not learn Dutch, and this strong English presence adds considerably to the pressures that English, as the language of globalisation, is already exerting on Dutch. Many Dutch multinational companies operate in English in any case, and want the eu to follow suit as soon as possible. In 1985, the Dutch made English a compulsory subject for all children from the last two years of primary school, and so one can predict that in thirty years time there will be no monolingual speakers of Dutch left. The Nijmegen linguist De Bot even envisages a scenario of a gradual, sector-by-sector transition of the country from Dutch into English, beginning in the economy, in science and (information) technology, the universities and academic publishing, then in entertainment and the media, and finally also in education, the law, politics, public life, and society in general.
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The languages of the ethnic minorities
In addition to European migrants, the Netherlands also attracts large numbers of immigrants from outside the European Union. The total number of the so-called ethnic minorities was at least 1.4 million people in 1997. A first subcategory, that of ex-colonial subjects, consists of some 287,000 people from Surinam, another 95,000 from the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba, an estimated 40,000 Moluccans, and some 10,000 Javanese. They often know Dutch and for that reason achieve better results in the Dutch education system than other newcomers, such as the economic immigrants and, more recently, the refugees and asylum seekers. The largest minorities here are the Turks (280,000), the Moroccans (233,000), the Chinese (90,000) and people from the former Yugoslavia (60,000). In addition, there
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are many small minorities from all over the world, from Eritrea, Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam, to Cape Verde and Brazil.
The key plank of the government's minorities policy is the new law on integration (‘Inburgering’) of 1998, which makes it obligatory for all newcomers who are not citizens of the European Union, the European Economic Region and the United States to take courses in Dutch, and to learn the customs, conventions and values of Dutch culture, in preparation for their integration into Dutch society. Given the numbers mentioned above, it is clear that the implementation of this Inburgering-programme will require a massive, long term investment in the teaching of Dutch as a second language. There is an urgent need to improve the quality of these courses, and also their accessibility within the existing education system and via local libraries, social clubs, the mass media and the internet.
There is every reason to do this, because the integration of immigrant minorities into Dutch society is becoming a matter of very serious concern. Speaking Dutch, achieving good results in the Dutch education system, and doing well in employment - these are the three key features that set the native Dutch apart from many immigrants in the ethnic minorities. This in turn brings the threat of a downward spiral for newcomers, of low proficiency in Dutch, followed by low educational achievement - often in poor, segregated schools - and low success in employment, leading to the formation of a new proletariat, a badly educated, hardly integrated, non-Dutch-speaking underclass, faced with exploitation and exclusion, and the risk of a life in crime.
On the positive side we note that, increasingly, the new minorities are organising themselves into a wide range of cultural, religious and political organisations, often with interesting European and global connections; and that all the larger Dutch political parties now have members from the minorities in the national parliament. The multicultural economy of today is generating jobs for the enterprising new Dutch who can speak other languages: in translation, language teaching, travel agencies, journalism (newspapers in Arabic, Kurmanji, and Hindi) and in the media, such as the new Turkish-Dutch Radio and tv, and Migrant Television Amsterdam. Many immigrants are making a valuable contribution to Dutch culture, producing world music, adding spice to the Dutch diet, and enriching the Dutch calendar with ethnic holidays. Meanwhile, immigrant writers such as Moses Isegawa, Abdelkader Benali, Kader Abdollah and Hafid Bouazza are adding a whole new dimension of linguistic creativity and creolisation to contemporary Dutch literature.
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The Netherlands as a multilingual society
The Netherlands today, especially in the urban areas, is a multilingual society, with Dutch as its common language, English as the dominant outside influence, and a wide range of indigenous and immigrant minority languages. Many speakers of minority languages, especially the smaller ones, will make the transition to Dutch for social and economic reasons; others, for personal, social and cultural reasons, may not do so. Individual newcomers may achieve varying degrees of proficiency in Dutch, but in general Dutch
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will become the common language for contact and communication between people of very different background and origin.
In the process we can expect an enormous increase in bilingualism, which will expose the Dutch language to many different linguistic influences. In Amsterdam today, more than 60% of school pupils are of non-Dutch speaking background, and schools where some 80 different home languages are spoken are not exceptional. The result will be a koinè Dutch with all kinds of new accents and idioms, new meanings and expressions, as we already see in the rise of new varieties such as Smurf speak, Nethermix and Netherenglish.
Processes of linguistic contact and interaction such as these - with complex patterns of mixing, switching and rivalries between languages, between the extremes of Dutch purism on the one hand and unfettered creolisation on the other - are likely to continue for the foreseeable future, since the influx of immigrants of every kind is projected to continue apace. By 2015 the ethnic minorities will reach 2.4 million, the other (European) migrants perhaps 2 million. Such numbers dwarf anything the Dutch have dealt with in the past. It is high time, therefore, to wake up to the fact that the Netherlands today is an immigration country, and so, just like Australia, will need to develop a well-considered language policy.
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Dutch for all?
Dutch will continue to dominate in the Netherlands, as the common language of the people, the media, politics, trade and commerce, education, sports and literature. From here it is only a small step to argue - as many Dutch people do - that there should be just one single official language for the public domain, since this will create equal conditions for everyone. This view goes well with the egalitarian character of Dutch society and with its long tradition of assimilation of newcomers. It also addresses a crucial practical point, viz. that without Dutch one faces great difficulties of integration and participation in Dutch society. And in effect, the new Inburgering-law of 1998 has already made Dutch the obligatory common language for a wide range of newcomers.
But the Inburgering-law, important as it is, can only be the first step towards a fully-fledged language policy. A single language policy may have been sufficient in the monolingual Dutch nation state of the past, but it will not do as an answer to the complex issues involved in contemporary multilingualism in an increasingly multicultural society. There is a host of questions concerning the other languages of the Netherlands that this policy does not address. For example, if Dutch is obligatory for the ethnic minorities because Dutch society needs a common language, then why don't we extend this requirement also to the sizeable numbers of European newcomers, and in particular the English speakers? Should we continue to exempt our fellow Europeans from any obligation to learn Dutch - remembering that in the near future Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey may become full members of the European Union? If so, how much scope should there be for teaching in mother tongues other than Dutch? And what about the Frisians?
If there is anything these questions make clear, it is that there is no one
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single linguistic remedy that will suit all situations. What is needed here is a differential language policy that works, and that can produce a fair balance between the various linguistic needs and rights involved. This should be developed, naturally, in the wider context of a European language policy framework.
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Promoting customer-friendly multilingualism
In the meantime, we would do well to accept that multilingualism is a living reality in the Netherlands today, and to realise that people who do not speak each others' languages, especially when their behaviour, customs, traditions and taboos are quite different from what the Dutch may be used to, will sooner or later have problems in communicating. Schools, hospitals, museums, the police, the courts, the social services are all increasingly aware that language and communication are crucial to the success of their operations. So, taking a practical approach, we should develop what Nelde has called ‘customer-friendly multilingualism’.
Already one can observe interesting developments here. In Amsterdam-Bijlmer, efforts are made to recruit labourers in their own language, using Papiamento, English and the languages of Ghana. In Utrecht, police officers take lessons in Arabic in order to be able to communicate with the local community in the multicultural suburb of Lombok. Dutch tv offers news bulletins for the deaf in Dutch Sign Language. The Dutch government uses Frisian in its Culture Plan, and is making an increasing amount of information on e.g. education, the social services and taxes available in Moroccan Arabic, Turkish, Chinese and other languages.
Initiatives such as these contribute to better contact. And we may well ask what other steps can be taken to facilitate communication. A basic first requirement here is to establish a database of the other languages of the Netherlands, of existing linguistic / communicative needs and available resources. Such central statistics are simply not available at the moment.
For the longer term, the Netherlands will need large numbers of welltrained linguists who can facilitate communication between speakers of different languages. To help people and organisations when they get stuck in insurmountable linguistic problems, there should be an essential provision such as the Language Line of Great Britain, a telephone service that connects them to speakers of the other languages involved. Beyond this, linguists will have to be trained who can audit and assess the growing linguistic needs of individuals, communities and organisations. There is work here for interpreters and translators, and for language managers who can match the various linguistic needs with available resources. The linguistic skills of bilingual people should be rewarded, and models of best practice for running the increasingly multilingual populations of schools, jails and hospitals need to be developed and disseminated. And, building on its longstanding tradition of effective foreign language teaching, the Netherlands will need to produce the language teachers, translators and technologies that can bridge existing communication gaps and turn them into productive opportunities - especially now, when the non-English use of the Internet is expected to quadruple over the next few years.
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What is needed is a commitment to invest in high quality language training, education and resources, and to develop a fair and effective approach to the problems as well as the opportunities presented by the growing multilingualism in contemporary Dutch society.
reinier salverda
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Bibliography
| baker, c. and s. prys jones (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Clevedon, 1998. |
| baker, ph. and j. eversley (eds.), Multilingual Capital. The Languages of London's Schoolchildren and their Relevance to Economic, Social and Educational Policies. London, 2000. |
| bot, c.l.j. de, Waarom deze rede niet in het Engels is. Inaugural lecture, Catholic University Nijmegen, 1994. |
| broeder, p. and g. extra, Language, Ethnicity & Education. Clevedon, 1999. |
| crystal, d., English as a Global Language. Cambridge, 1997. |
| dorren, g., Nieuwe tongen. De talen van migranten in Nederland en Vlaanderen. The Hague / Antwerp / Utrecht, 1999. |
| extra, g. and t. vallen, ‘Migration and multilingualism in Western Europe. A case study on the Netherlands’. In: Grabe, W. (ed.), Multilingualism and Multilingual Communities, 1997 (= American Review of Applied Linguistics, 1997). |
| nelde, p., m. strubel and g. williams (eds), Euromosaic. The production and reproduction of the minority language groups in the European Union. Luxembourg, 1996. |
| salverda, r. (1998), ‘Frisian’. In: Price, G. (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe. Oxford, 1998; pp. 177-184. |
| smeets, h.m.a.g., e.p. martens and j. veenman (eds.), Jaarboek Minderheden 1999. Houten / Tiegem / Lelystad, 1999. |
| smeets, r., ‘Talen en taalpolitiek in de Europese Unie’. In: Sijs, N. van der (ed), Taaltrots. Purisme in een veertigtal talen. Amsterdam / Antwerp, 1999; pp. 381-416. |
| swaan, a. de, ‘The Evolving European Language System: A Theory of Communication Potential and Language Competition’. In: International Political Science Review 14 (1993), no. 3, pp. 241-255. |
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Websites
| European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages - http://www.eblul.org |
| Euromosaic - http://www.uoc.es/euromosaic |
| Forum Instituut voor Multiculturele Ontwikkeling - http://www.forum.imo.nl |
| Fryske Akademy - http://www.fa.knaw.nl |
| Meertens-instituut - http://www.meertens.knaw.nl |
| Onze Taal: http://www.onzetaal.com |
| Polder Dutch - http://www.hum.uva.nl/poldernederlands |
| sil Ethnologue Database - http://www.sil.org/ethnologue |
| Nederlandse Taalunie - http://www.taalunie.nl |
| Tolkencentrum - http://www.tolkencentrum-non.nl |
| Voor Allochtonen Door Allochtonen - http://www.vada.nl |
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