Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 145
Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)
Conflicts in the city, cities in conflict? Romano-Germanic encounters in the Low Countries.
Authors: Peersman, Catharina Fernanda; Vosters, Rik; Rutten, Gijsbert
Submitted by: Peersman, Catharina Fernanda (FWO & K.U.Leuven, Belgium)
For centuries, the Low Countries have been at the intersection of Germanic and Romance cultures and languages, where various cities have become metaphorical epicenters of language contact. Whether in peaceful coexistence or at the heart of heated conflicts, these Romano-Germanic encounters have made their mark on the sociolinguistic landscapes of present-day Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, and left a fascinating paper trail for (historical) sociolinguists to investigate.
Past research has often focused on internal aspects of language contact (e.g. lexical borrowing, Geeraerts &Grondelaers 1999). In recent years, however, linguistic encounters in the Low Countries have also sparked up a considerable amount of interest from sociolinguistic angles, often within a larger European framework (Darquennes 2010). It is well-known that contact between languages – or better: contact between language users – implies conflict as well, and language is often used to index underlying socio-political oppositions (Nelde 1987). In Belgium, the current governmental crisis goes hand in hand with the highly politicized tension between francophone and Dutch-speaking communities, where contemporary conflicts are often framed in historical terms (De Keere & Elchardus 2011).
In the past, cities have especially served as focal points for sociolinguistic events: Coutrai and Bruges as the mythicized places where ‘French oppression’ was halted by the Flemish in 1302 (Lambert 2000), Brussels as the multilingual capital of the new Belgian nation and its policy of Frenchification in the nineteenth century (Vanhecke & De Groof 2007), and Luxembourg city as a language planning laboratory of the twentieth century (Horner 2009). But sites of intense contact and conflict can also be found in other areas, such as the German-speaking territories in Wallonia, which posses considerable amounts of cultural and linguistic autonomy as a result of the language struggle in the rest of Belgium.
In this panel, we would like to bring together an international group of experts on Romano-Germanic encounters in the Low Countries, focusing on language contact and language conflict in urban contexts. We welcome papers on both the historical and the present-day situation, from any subfield of sociolinguistics (language policy, language ideology, discourse analysis, language and identity studies, etc.). The languages under discussion are Dutch, French, German and Luxembourgish. Possible research topics include:
- language legislation and the protection of minority and majority languages
- French as a prestige language in the history of the Low Countries
- migration and language shift, for instance in French Flanders and in Brussels
- multilingualism in the Low Countries: status, corpus and acquisition planning
- Flemish language identities in urban contexts
- language education and education policy
- competing language ideologies and the position of French in Flanders
- language policy and linguistic identities in Luxembourg city
- the German-speaking community as a ‘privileged minority’ in Belgium?
- French as the language of trade and diplomacy in late medieval and early modern urban life
References
DArquennes, Jeroen. 2010. “Language contact and language conflict in autochthonous language minority settings in the EU: A preliminary round-up of guiding principles and research desiderata”. Multilingua 29(3/4), 337-351.
De Keere, Kobe - Elchardus, Mark. 2011. “Narrating linguistic conflict: a storytelling analysis of the language conflict in Belgium”. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 32(3), 221-234.
Geeraerts, Dirk - Grondelaers, Stefan. 1999. “Purism and fashion. French influence on Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch”. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 13, 53-67.
Horner, Kristine (ed.). 2009. Luxembourg. Special issue of Language Problems and Language Planning 33(2), 101-189.
Lambert, Véronique. 2000. “De Guldensporenslag van fait-divers tot ankerpunt van de Vlaamse identiteit (1302-1838): de natievormende functionaliteit van historiografische mythen”. Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 115(3), 365-391.
Nelde, Peter. 1987. “Language contact means language conflict”. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 8, 33-42.
Vanhecke, Eline - De Groof, Jetje. 2007. “New data on language policy and language choice in 19th-century Flemish city administrations”. In: Elspaß, Stephan - Langer, Nils - Scharloth, Joachim - Vandenbussche, Wim, Germanic Language Histories ‘from Below’ (1700-2000). Berlin - New York: Mouton de Gruyter.