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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 646

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

French meets Dutch in the Low Countries (17th-19th centuries)

Authors: Rutten, Gijsbert (1); Vosters, Rik (2)
Submitted by: Vosters, Rik (Vrije Universiteit Brussel / University of Pennsylvania, Belgium)

In this paper, we will discuss the interplay of varieties of Dutch and French in the Low Countries in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century, when French is generally assumed to have been a prestige variety, also for many speakers of Dutch. We will focus both on ideological aspects of the language contact situation and on contact phenomena in actual language use.

In the first part of the paper, we will address the issue of French and Dutch language contact from a language ideological perspective. Whereas the period under discussion has often been described and criticized as one of frenchification (verfransing), both by contemporary commentators and by later (language) historians, this view has come under severe attack since Frijhoff’s seminal 1989 paper. More recently, Vandenbussche (2001), Ruberg (2005) and Vanhecke & De Groof (2007) have shown that, despite contextually bound preferences for French, Dutch remained widely in use, also within the alleged Francophile upper classes. Ruberg, for instance, shows that only 17% of elite correspondence from around 1800 is in French. We will discuss the impact of these recent studies on the debate about frenchification, and explore the possible repercussions of this new view on both the status and the form of Early Modern Dutch. 

In the second part of the paper, we will report on case studies into the actual influence of French on the grammar of Dutch, by focusing on loan suffixes such as –age (as in French courage, bagage), which have made their way into the Dutch morphological system (e.g. lekkage 'leak', with a native verbal base). As historical corpus-based studies into language contact phenomena are largely lacking, we will restrict ourselves to exploratory case studies in a variety of corpora of historical Dutch currently at our disposal, comprising both private letters and administrative and legal documents, from both the Southern and the Northern Netherlands.

References:

Frijhoff, Willem. 1989. ‘Verfransing? Franse taal en Nederlandse cultuur tot in de revolutietijd’. Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 104: 592-609.

Ruberg, Willemijn. 2005. Conventionele correspondentie. Briefcultuur van de Nederlandse elite, 1770-1850. Nijmegen: Vantilt.

Vandenbussche, W. 2001. ‘Nederlands als prestigetaal voor de Brugse upper class in de 19de eeuw?’. Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 2: 323-40. 

Vanhecke, E. & J. De Groof. 2007. ‘New data on language policy and language choice in 19th-century Flemish city administrations’. In: Elspaß, S., N. Langer, J. Scharloth, & W. Vandenbussche (eds.), Germanic language histories from below (1700-2000), Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, pp. 449-65.