Dutch. A linguistic history of Holland and Belgium

[p. II]

To my mother

[p. VII]

Preface

There has long been a need for a book in English about the Dutch language that presents important, interesting information in a form accessible even to those who know no Dutch and have no immediate intention of learning it. The need for such a book became all the more obvious to me, when, once employed in a position that entailed the dissemination of Dutch language and culture in an Anglo-Saxon society, I was continually amazed by the ignorance that prevails with regard to the Dutch language, even among colleagues involved in the teaching of other European languages. How often does one hear that Dutch is a dialect of German, or that Flemish and Dutch are closely related (but presumably separate) languages? To my knowledge there has never been a book in English that sets out to clarify such matters and to present other relevant issues to the general and studying public.^1.

Holland's contributions to European and world history, to art, to shipbuilding, hydraulic engineering, bulb growing and cheese manufacture for example, are all aspects of Dutch culture which have attracted the interest of other nations, and consequently there are numerous books in English and other languages on these subjects. But the language of the people that achieved so much in all those fields has been almost completely neglected by other nations, and to a degree even by the Dutch themselves who have long been admired for their polyglot talents but whose lack of interest in their own language seems never to have disturbed them. And so the task of writing a book about Dutch in a language other than Dutch has fallen to a foreigner, but it is one I'm only too keen to fulfill. I have had close contact with the Netherlands for over a decade now during which time I have come to cherish many aspects of Dutch culture, but none so much as the language. This book is the result of my twelve year old ‘affair’ with the Dutch language.

After English and German, Dutch is the most important Germanic language, spoken by some twenty million people in Holland and Belgium. Outside the Low Countries it is little known or studied, although many more universities in the world teach Dutch than is generally realised. I hope this book will go some way towards enthusing those readers who do not yet know any Dutch, into reaching for a grammar and delving further into the language.

There are numerous books in English on the development of French and German which are intensively used by the English-speaking student of those languages, so there must be room for at least one on Dutch. There is actually more available in English on Frisian than there is on Dutch, a fact which seems to have

1. The one exception to this statement is a booklet which appeared while this book was being prepared: ‘Dutch - the language of twenty million Dutch and Flemish people’, published by the Stichting Ons Erfdeel, Rekkem, Belgium, 1981.

[p. VIII]

been overlooked by Dutch scholars. I expect a common reaction among academics teaching Dutch to be that their students should be able to consult reputable Dutch works on the topic and thus have no need of a book such as this. Why then, I ask such critics, does this argument not apply to French and German in which the tertiary student has usually had a school background, unlike Dutch, which is nearly always commenced after leaving school?

The Dutch language sources which I have drawn on for my information are, generally speaking, now somewhat old, not written in a Dutch that is easy for foreigners to follow, and most go into far greater detail than is necessary for the undergraduate student. What is more, the subject matter of the various chapters of this book is only to be found in numerous Dutch books - no one Dutch language text covers everything I have here, which makes acquisition of all relevant texts expensive and difficult, or even impossible.

The originality of this book lies in the synthesis of the material. Most of it is available only in Dutch, which, quite apart from being inaccessible to the English speaker, is often unpalatable even to the Dutch speaker because the Dutch texts are so antiquated or erudite or usually both. This fact has no doubt been partially responsible for the waning in interest in historical grammar among students of Dutch in Holland and Belgium that has occurred over the last few years. Much of what I present here is extremely basic, but precisely because it is so basic, and yet has never been available in English, it is high time that it appears in a book such as this. The chapter on historical phonology is an example of a new approach to a well documented subject: whereas all previous Dutch works on the topic have presumed (formerly rightly, but increasingly wrongly) that the reader had a knowledge of Gothic and Common Germanic, and thus they worked forward from the oldest forms of sounds to what they are in Dutch today, I have reversed the process. Nowadays most people have not done any Gothic, not even students of Germanic languages - at least this is the case in the Anglo-Saxon world - and therefore it makes more sense to work back from the known, i.e. the sounds as they are today, to the unknown, i.e. the sounds as they were in Common Germanic times. And because people tend to think in terms of how sounds are written, rather than how they are pronounced, I have taken the graphemes as the starting point. Continual contrast with English and German also helps to illustrate what is being explained - after all ohne Vergleichung, kein Verständnis.

As many of these matters are normally only discussed in Dutch, I was often faced with the difficulty of how to render certain concepts in English. For example, the main dialects of Dutch are called in Dutch Hollands, Brabants, Vlaams etc. but how should one refer to them in English? Vlaams can clearly be translated by the word Flemish, but Hollands and Brabants? Some writers have called them Hollandic, Brabantic etc. I find this however rather forced, as indeed is also the word Netherlandic which does nevertheless seem to enjoy some support, chiefly in America. I have opted for leaving such Dutch words untranslated, as I have also done with the words plat, cultuurtaal, beschaafd and Randstad, for example. Thus such words appear in the text in italics, but they are defined in the glossary.

It is perhaps also necessary to defend my use of the word Holland, as used in the title for example, where it refers to what is otherwise known as the Netherlands. I maintain that whatever the feelings of the Dutch may be on the use of Holland and

[p. IX]

Nederland in Dutch, the attitude of the English speaker is quite different. Anglo-Saxons think of the country primarily as Holland and to refer to it consistently as the Netherlands, as I would have done had this book been written in Dutch, sounds unnatural and even pedantic. If and when the term Holland is used in reference to the former county of Holland (i.e. the present-day provinces of North and South Holland), this is made clear in the text. Where the word Hollands has been left untranslated, it refers to the dialect of those provinces and is not used as a synonym of Nederlands which is rendered by the word ‘Dutch’.

There has always been an overwhelming emphasis in language departments at Anglo-Saxon universities on the literature of the languages concerned, which has not been the case to anything like the same extent in Holland and Belgium. Tertiary students enrol to do a foreign language and once they have progressed beyond the basics of the grammar, they find that the language is often subordinate to the literature. I make a plea with the appearance of this book for Dutch studies at English-speaking universities not to go or continue to go in the same direction as French, German and Italian studies; an interest in the language in its own right should be encouraged, with or without an accompanying study of the literature of the language in question. Often the study of language history is either brushed off as too difficult for undergraduates or, alternatively, it is pooh-poohed as being a waste of time - the latter reaction is always a sad reflection of the ignorance of the speaker, whereas the ‘difficulty’ of historical language study, particularly of historical phonology, will, it is hoped, be alleviated by the approach I have employed in this book.

The interest in the historical study of Dutch I hope to generate with this book will encourage some readers to want to read more. With this in mind, every chapter is accompanied by a bibliography of works (including a commentary on the relative worth, importance, difficulty etc. of the books) on that facet of Dutch studies dealt with in each chapter. This book can thus be regarded as the Anglo-Saxon student's first introduction to the interesting world of the Dutch language and can be used as a stepping stone into the wealth of literature that exists in Dutch on the topic.

The structure of the book warrants a word of explanation at this point. Section 1, the present, is likely to be of use to people who, at least initially, have no need of section 2. It is intended primarily for those with no knowledge of the language who wish to know what the learning of Dutch entails and/or how it differs from, or is similar to, English and German. Section 2 part A, the external history of the language, should be of equal use to both those who do and those who don't know any Dutch, whereas part B, the historical grammar, will probably only be fully appreciated by those with more advanced knowledge of the language. By incorporating section 1 and 2 in the same book. I am, it is true, trying to kill several birds with the one stone.

I should perhaps point out one apparent inconsistency in the structure of the book. Whereas the chapters on modern phonology and morphology have parallel chapters in the historical section, I have not included an historical counterpart to chapter 7, the chapter on word order. This is in part a reflection of the situation as it is in Holland and Belgium. There has simply been very little done on the historical syntax of Dutch, and what has been done, is so rudimentary and unsystematic as to be unsuitable for incorporation in a book such as this.

[p. X]

Originally I intended incorporating chapters on Frisian and Afrikaans, but on reflection I decided against this. Firstly, to have done so would have made the book rather long and secondly, although Frisian and even Afrikaans could be said to be part of the ‘linguistic history of Holland and Belgium’, I would not have wanted to imply that they are not separate languages. In addition, there is already a number of texts in English on Frisian, as previously mentioned, and although this is certainly not the case for Afrikaans, the subject really warrants greater treatment than an additional chapter in this book could have given it. This is not to say, however, that I have not referred regularly to Afrikaans where the situation there is able to shed light on the situation in the Netherlands.

Because of the rather large scope of this book and the diversity of people that it is intended for, I have attempted to make it complete in itself - thus the glossary which includes an explanation of many terms that may be known to the linguist, but will be new to many laymen. Similarly a knowledge of the history of the Low Countries is useful for a thorough understanding of some of the issues covered in this book but I have not presupposed an acquaintance with Dutch and Belgian history. Therefore, on occasions, there are quite extensive accounts of historical events that are integral to an understanding of the linguistic concepts being discussed. An example of this is the quite detailed chapter on events in Belgium, where, in order to understand the present, an account of past events is unavoidable; thus the occurrence of a basically historical chapter in section 1.

Of course I have had to be selective in deciding what to incorporate and what to exclude. Some people will undoubtedly disagree with aspects of the selection I have made. My criterion for inclusion of data in this work has been largely what I myself have found either interesting or important about the Dutch language over the years of my acquaintance with it. On occasions I even resort to personal impressions and opinions that may not be shared by others but which are based on my experience of Holland and Belgium as a native-speaker of English from the ‘colonies’. For example, some of my comments on upper and lower class usage and attitudes to Belgium many a Dutch or Belgian academic may be unprepared to put in the same terms; but as an outsider looking in, I can, I feel, be permitted to convey the impressions I have received.