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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 473

Part of Session 145: Conflicts in the city, cities in conflict? (Other abstracts in this session)

Ideologies of monolingualism in a multilingual region

Authors: Vogl, Ulrike
Submitted by: Vogl, Ulrike (University of Vienna, Austria)

During the Middle Ages and Early Modern times, the Low Countries were a linguistically diverse region, with a continuum of Germanic and Romance varieties spoken between the North Sea and the present-day border of France and Belgium. Language contact and mixing were a common phenomenon, especially in the urban centres that attracted migration from across the Low Countries and beyond. Present-day Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg can equally be characterized by multilingual practices, in (varieties of) Germanic and Romance languages as well as in migrant languages. Again, cities are centres of linguistic encounters and conflict (cf. Jaspers 2009).

Nonetheless, the present-day Low Countries are commonly depicted in terms of juxtaposed monolingual entities – the Dutch-speaking Netherlands, French-speaking Wallonia, Dutch-speaking Flanders – with mixed Brussels as a 'problem', trilingual Luxembourg as an exception and urban multilingualism (e.g. in migrant languages) as a threat. More importantly, also the linguistic history of the region is generally written from the perspective of the modern standard languages and their respective roles as national languages - the Dutch/French language; accordingly, every instance of language contact and societal multilingualism is usually depicted as an aberration on the way to territorial monolingualism and linguistic homogeneity. Language historiography of this type helped (re)produce 'myths', for example about the complete Frenchification of public life in Flanders under French occupation from 1795 onwards – a Frenchification which was probably not as far-reaching as depicted from the viewpoint of 'national language histories', as recent empirical research shows (cf. De Groof 2004).

The main aim of this paper is to give an overview of the sociolinguistic history of the Low Countries where the focus is on discrepancies between the multilingual reality and a language ideology with the ideal of a standard language as its core. Standard language ideology has its roots in Early Modern times and is the dominant ideology of language in Europe today (cf. Gal 2009). According to us, it obscures, in many conflict situations, the actual multilingual practices of the language communities involved. One recent example would be the region around Brussels (Vlaamse Rand) with a linguistically mixed population typical of the margins of urban centres which is, however, in political/linguistic debates in Flanders, construed as a region where the homogeneity of the Flemish language region is threatened (cf. Vogl & Hüning 2010).

References :

Gal, Susan (2009): Migration, minorities and multilingualism: language ideologies in Europe. In: Mar-Molinero, Clare; Stevenson, Patrick (eds.): Language ideologies, policies and practices. Language and the future of Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 13–27.

Groof, Jetje de (2004): Nederlandse taalplanning in Vlaanderen in de lange negentiende eeuw (1795-1914). Een linguïstische analyse met speciale aandacht voor de wisselwerking tussen status- en corpusplanning. (PhD thesis VUB Brussels).

Jaspers, Jürgen (ed.) (2009): De klank van de stad. Stedelijke meertaligheid en interculturele communicatie. Antwerpen: Acco.

Vogl, Ulrike; Hüning, Matthias (2010): One nation, one language? The case of Belgium. Dutch Crossing 34 (3), 228–247.