The Low Countries. Jaargang 13

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Speaking Dutch - Past, Present and Future

All around the world today, English, as the language of globalisation, is rapidly spreading everywhere. China already has 200 million English speakers, Chile has just decided to make English an obligatory second language after Spanish, Germany has instituted 500 new MA courses that are taught in English, and even if the European Union (EU) is officially multilingual, in reality we may well be heading - as Robert Phillipson has suggested - towards an English-only Europe.

In a number of EU member states this development has triggered debate about the future of their own national language. French, for example, which is in a very strong position with 350 million speakers worldwide, is steadily losing ground to English in international communications, trade, entertainment and scientific publishing. In these domains the future of French may well depend on whether, and how effectively, the EU's multilingualism can be made to work. This situation - coming as it does after centuries of a single national language policy imposed by the French state - of course involves a major cultural change for the French.

The language issue has also come up in the Low Countries, where Dutch, with 22 million speakers, ranks number seven among the official languages of the EU. Both in Flanders and the Netherlands - just as in France - the language has the active support of the state, and it is well-established in the media, politics and the education system. In contrast to French, however, Dutch is a polycentric language, with two main centres, the Holland/Randstad area in the Netherlands and the Flanders/Brabant area in Belgium. While the two centres share the same standard language, they also - as Robert Howell has pointed out - represent two sharply contrasting kinds of nationalism. In Flanders and Belgium, for example, as in France, the language is enshrined in the constitution, whereas in the Netherlands, as in Britain and the USA, it is not.

The difference between the two centres is clearly apparent in two recent books on the history of the Dutch language, respectively The Story of Flemish (Het verhaal van het Vlaams, 2003) by Roland Willemyns and Wim Daniels, and Language is Made by People. The Making of General Standard Dutch (Taal is mensenwerk. Het ontstaan van het ABN, 2004) by Nicoline van der Sijs.

Willemyns and Daniels start with the Middle Ages, when the cities of Flanders formed the hub of the European economy until the Spanish sack of Antwerp in 1585, when some hundred thousand Flemings fled to Holland. Amongst them was the mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620) from Bruges, who exerted a major influence on the development of the Dutch language in the north. For the southern Netherlands, however, this was a major cultural, intellectual and economic disaster. Ruled from abroad - first from Madrid, then Vienna, then Paris - they fell prey to the onslaught of French, especially after 1750. Later, in the nineteenth century, when Belgium had gained its independence, again French was the dominant language.

The history of Flemish offered by Willemyns and Daniels is laced with all kinds of new and surprising data, for example about the continuing use in the eighteenth century of the vernacular in administration, the courts and the schools; about the low levels of literacy in Dutch and the widespread use of local dialect; and about the cultural tradition kept alive by Flemish writers such as Willem Verhoeven and Jan Baptist Verlooy. For the nineteenth century too they report some interesting discoveries. For example, at the time there were more Dutch-speaking people living in Flanders than up north in the Netherlands. And during the brief reunion with the Netherlands between 1815 and 1830, the Dutch language policy of King William I (1814-1840) was actually far more successful than previously thought. By the end of his fifteen-year rule the use of Dutch in Flanders had become quite widespread, and this in turn provided the foundation for the Flemish Movement and its long and difficult but ultimately successful struggle for linguistic and cultural rights in Belgium.

As Willemyns and Daniels conclude, ‘Flanders today is a monolingual state within federal Belgium; Dutch

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is the official language of the majority of the population and of the wealthiest part of the country. All the things that determine the prestige of a language can be found in Flanders today, and as long as this situation does not change, there is nothing that can threaten the status, the function and the prestige of Dutch in Belgium.’

Van der Sijs, by contrast, takes as her starting point the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, and keeps her focus throughout on the development of the standard language in the North. Her book contains a series of solid chapters on the historical development of Dutch spelling, pronunciation, morphology, grammar and lexicon, and on the many people (‘Dramatis Personae’) who over the centuries have shaped the modern Dutch standard language. Amongst the illustrations there are a number of good language maps.

Of particular interest are the data she presents on migration and the demography of the past. In the seventeenth century, half the population of Amsterdam consisted of immigrant speakers of Low German, and these have exerted a major influence on the further development of Dutch. It is true that many other languages were in use in Amsterdam at the time - Latin in academic, legal and theological circles, French by the Huguenot refugees, Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrew by the Sephardic Jews, Italian in the domains of commerce and music, Malay in the printing works of the East India Company (VOC) - but the demographic factor has been decisive. A large majority of the people in Amsterdam spoke Dutch, and the extensive diphthongisation which was then common in the backstreets and which was definitely not the norm for civilised pronunciation has since become the common standard throughout the Netherlands. As Van der Sijs shows with many interesting details, Dutch then also became the main language of the Bible and the Protestant church, of the schools, politics, the law, science and literature.

However, developments in neighbouring Flanders are mentioned only when Van der Sijs gives a comparative review of the differences between Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands and Belgian Dutch. Her list of Dramatis Personae mentions a fair number of Flemings, but these are almost all different from those mentioned by Willemyns and Daniels. Her account of Simon Stevin is much more detailed than theirs, but that is because he played such an important role in the formation of the Northern Dutch standard. King William I, however, is not mentioned in her book.

These differences reflect the general relationship between the Flemish and the Dutch. They may be neighbours in Europe and they may speak the same language, but centuries of history have left a legacy, and here the two books testify to the lively and often productive tension between the two main centres within the Dutch-speaking area. However, as the books also demonstrate, the national border, although in theory abolished under the Schengen Treaty of 1995, continues to represent an important socio-cultural reality. European unification here offers an opportunity for the Netherlands and Flanders to (re-)discover each other as Dutch-speaking neighbours. This is not a simple and straightforward matter, though, and will require a certain toleration for the existing north-south differences within Dutch, as well as an active and effective cooperation in language matters over the longer term. Over the past quarter-century this process has been set in motion and is now well under way, through the Dutch Language Union and the Dutch-Flemish Cultural Treaty, through all kinds of cross-border cooperation, cultural as well as economic, and via deBuren, the joint centre for Dutch and Flemish culture in Europe that opened in Brussels in June 2004.

As for the future, both books take a cautious look at how the twenty-first century may affect the Dutch language. Both expect further change, but again with interesting differences in emphasis. Alongside the uniform standard language of today, Van der Sijs expects an increasing range of variation in Dutch, due to pressure from regiolects, informal group languages, the ethnic Dutch of immigrant minorities, and English (which is being used more and more in the Dutch education system). She is optimistic about the vitality of the language. Dutch will definitely not disappear; it will become different, of course, but no less strong. And again, just as in the seventeenth century, demography will be the key - the fact that so many people

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today are speaking Dutch. Willemyns and Daniels too are confident that the Dutch language in Belgium is not under threat, at least not from the inside. They expect a further divergence between the North, where the new ‘Polder Dutch’ (Poldernederlands) will grow and expand, and the South which will see more and more ‘Beautiful Flemish’ (Schoon Vlaams). To counterbalance this, they add, a large-scale language planning effort will be needed for the longer term.

In this context it is really extremely interesting to see that neither of the books spends much time on English. English may have become an unofficial second language in both Flanders and Holland today, but there appears to be no need to discuss this, since it is used predominantly with English-speaking foreigners and not by the Dutch and Flemish amongst themselves. There is a simple but crucial message here for language policy makers - the future of the Dutch language is going to be determined by the millions of people who speak it and want to speak it.

Reinier Salverda

Howell, Robert B., ‘The Low Countries: a study in sharply contrasting nationalisms’. In: Stephen Barbour & Catie Carmichael (eds.), Language and Nationalism in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 130-150.
Phillipson, Robert, English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy. London: Routledge, 2003. 240 pp.
Treffers-Daller, Jeanine & Roland Willemyns (eds.), Language Contact at the Romance-Germanic Language Border. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2002. 149 pp.
Van der Sijs, Nicoline, Taal is mensenwerk. Het ontstaan van het ABN. The Hague: Sdu Uitgevers, 2004. 718 pp.
Willemyns, Roland & Wim Daniels, Het Verhaal van het Vlaams. De Geschiedenis van het Nederlands in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden. Antwerpen/ Utrecht: Standaard/Het Spectrum, 2003. 399 pp.