Past, Present and Future of a Language Border

Catharina Peersman, Gijsbert Rutten, Rik Vosters, Catharina Peersman, Gijsbert Rutten, Rik Vosters

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501501067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume revisits the issue of language contact and conflict in the Low Countries across space and time. The contributions deal with important sites of Germanic-Romance contact along the different language borders, covering languages such as French, Dutch, German, and Luxembourgish. This first monograph in English on the topic broadens our understanding of current-day issues by integrating a historical perspective, showing how language contact and conflict operated from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, the 18th and 19th centuries, and into the 20th and 21st centuries.

Catharina Peersman, Gijsbert Rutten and Rik Vosters

Chapter 1

Romance-Germanic encounters along the language border: past, present and future

1 Language borders as sites of contact and conflict

For centuries, the Low Countries have been at the intersection of Germanic and Romance cultures and languages. The French-Dutch and French–German language borders, cutting through the present-day territories of France, Belgium and Luxembourg, have given rise to often intense situations of language contact and conflict, both in situations of every-day communication and in more stylised domains such as literature, diplomacy and science. This has led to various degrees of societal and individual multilingualism. Whether in peaceful coexistence or at the heart of heated conflicts, these Romance–Germanic encounters have made their mark on the sociolinguistic landscapes of the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) and have left a fascinating paper trail for (historical) sociolinguists to investigate. This volume brings together a range of state-of-the-art contributions, discussing sociolinguistic aspects of these Romance–Germanic encounters from the thirteenth century to the present.

Societal multilingualism and linguistic conflicts in the Low Countries have been at the heart of research on language planning and language contact for a long time now, and seminal sociolinguistic studies such as Nelde (1987, 1989, 1997) offer recent scholarship a firm foundation upon which to build. The issue of Romance–Germanic contact and conflict has become particularly relevant again in recent years, not only with the recent resurgence of language planning efforts in Luxembourg (Horner 2009), but also with linguistic quarrels being perceived to be at the basis of the recent political crises in Belgium (De Keere and Elchardus 2011). In addition, linguistic encounters in the Low Countries have also sparked off a considerable amount of interest within a larger European language planning perspective (Darquennes 2010). Romance–Germanic language contact and conflict in the Low Countries has been explored in earlier thematic publications such as Wright and Kelly (1995, as a special issue of Current Issues in Language and Society) and Treffers-Daller and Willemyns (2002, as a special issue of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development), and the work of Peter Nelde, although concerned with the notion of language conflict more generally, has often focused on the Belgian situation as a case in point (cf. also the contribution by Darquennes in the present volume). Many publications focus exclusively on the Romance–Germanic language border in Belgium (e.g. Lamarcq and Rogge’s 1996 study on its origin and oldest development), and the Belgian French and Dutch language conflict more specifically (e.g. Von Busekist’s 1998 discussion of linguistic conflicts and language planning efforts since the end of the ancien régime, especially within the framework of the emerging Belgian nation state). Furthermore, the recent stream and relative commercial success of popularising works on issues of language borders, language contact and linguistic conflicts in Belgium shows how these topics are not only of interest among linguists and historians, but also appeal to many individual language users in the areas concerned (e.g. Fonteyn 2009; Witte and Van Velthoven 2010; Raskin 2012; Devoldere 2013).

Apart from earlier work focusing on language contact in the Low Countries specifically, recent studies on language choice and societal multilingualism within the emerging domain of historical sociolinguistics also make up the context for the present volume. More and more work is focusing on linguistic tensions within historical contexts of multilingualism, approaching societal and individual multilingualism from a distinctly sociohistorical perspective, often within a broader European context (e.g. the work of Rindler Schjerve 2003 on language conflicts and language planning in the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian Habsburg empire, but also various contributions in Braunmüller and Ferraresi 2003). This historical and sociolinguistic turn in the study of multilingualism and language contact adds to the already extensive body of research in contact linguistics, where most attention has traditionally been paid to intralinguistic mechanisms and explanations, for instance in the study of lexical and structural transfer, or contact-induced language change (e.g. Van Coetsem 1988; Thomason and Kaufman 1991).

2 Language contact and conflict across time, space and disciplines

The present volume focuses on language contact and conflict in one specific area, the Low Countries, which is studied from a variety of different perspectives. Diachronically, the volume ranges from the earliest records and reflections of language contact and conflict in the thirteenth century to the present-day situation in the early twenty-first century. With this diachronic perspective and the broad time-span covered we hope to offer a valuable contribution to the study of language contact and conflict, which often focuses on present-day situations. The same also applies to research on the Low Countries specifically: our understanding of present-day language contact and conflict has much to gain from historical depth, as the chapter by Peersman amply demonstrates. Focusing on the oldest period represented in this volume, the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, she uncovers the foundations of present-day identities constructed and debated in political and linguistic conflicts in Belgium.

The geographical scope of the volume also extends beyond the traditional focus on Brussels or Belgium more generally. This volume incorporates language contact and conflict situations in the other geographical areas that were historically part of the Low Countries, such as the present-day Netherlands, Luxembourg and the German-speaking borderland in the east of Belgium. By widening the geographical scope to the whole of the Low Countries, the present volume aims to put the classic case of Belgian societal multilingualism into a broader perspective, thus capturing examples of historical Romance–Germanic language contact and conflict situations that would otherwise not receive sufficient attention or would not be studied in conjunction with each other. This wide geographic range ensures coverage of recent scholarship on French, Dutch, German and Luxembourgish.

As language contact and conflict is a research topic that has appealed to scholars in different research traditions, the present volume is also characterised by multi-disciplinarity, bringing together empirical approaches to the subject from the angles of language variation and change, contact linguistics, discourse analysis, historical language sociology, language planning and policy, and language-in-education planning. Though many contributors work in the field of sociolinguistics in the broadest sense, the volume also comprises chapters by historians and sociologists. What binds all of the contributions together is the focus on language contact as a societal rather than just a linguistic phenomenon: as such, all of the contributions have roots in historical sociolinguistics, which is one of the most productive and innovative research paradigms focusing on the social history of language.

3 Theoretical and historical outline

The present volume consists of two main parts: a first section offers three introductory, comparative and theoretical reflections on the object of study, and a second section comprises individual case studies in chronological order. Many of the themes implicitly or explicitly addressed in these sections are taken up in the Epilogue by Richard Watts, which offers a thorough re-thinking of the crucial concepts underpinning the volume. The first part of the book brings together three overview chapters with a broader perspective, covering recent developments in language planning and language conflict research (Darquennes), a historical and typological outline of language border changes in the Low Countries (Willemyns) and a discussion of standard language ideologies in the linguistic historiography of the Low Countries (Vogl).

In his chapter on “The dimensions of language conflict: an exploration”, Jeroen Darquennes seeks to provide an overview of the way in which language conflict has been discussed in European and North-American studies on language policy and planning in language contact settings since the early 1950s. Special attention is paid to the alleged inseparability of language contact and language conflict (“Nelde’s Law”), the theoretical and methodological underpinnings and challenges of language conflict research and diachronic as well as synchronic research perspectives. The chapter starts with a systematic sketch of the main areas of focus of language conflict research, i.e. language, the individual language user(s) and society. Zooming in on the third area of focus, Darquennes explores the dimensions of language conflict in society, discussing in succession possible causes of language conflict, its visibility and manifestation in societies, focal points such as the structural properties of a specific variety or language choice in different domains and finally language conflict management, including corpus, status and acquisition planning. After offering an overview of existing methods, he rounds off with a number of research desiderata, stressing that research on language conflict would, for example, greatly benefit from investigations into the actors and their motives in language conflict situations, as well as into the duration and intensity of language contact and conflict situations.

After Darquennes’ more theoretical overview, Roland Willemyns focuses on the Dutch–French language border in his chapter “Trilingual tug-of-war: language border fluctuations in the Low Countries”. After a short summary of the historical background of the language contact and conflict in Alsace, Switzerland and South Tyrol, he discusses both historical (French Flanders) and actual language borders (Belgium, Luxembourg). As such, his chapter provides the backdrop against which many of the later contributions can be read. Particular attention is paid to how the territoriality principle has influenced the Dutch–French language border in Belgium to become not just a mere linguistic notion, but a legal, administrative and political reality. Willemyns examines the part played by linguistic legislation, language planning and other sociolinguistic developments in order to determine the Belgian problem areas, with special consideration for the highly complex nature of the capital, Brussels. He then moves on to contextualise trilingual contact in German-speaking Belgium and Luxembourg. The discussion of the different borders and contact situations finally builds up to a typology of language borders and patterns of change, with Willemyns discerning essentially two types of language border based on language shift (the first resulting in erosion, the second resulting in a change of location of the border) and two patterns of change (monolingualisation and bilingualisation).

The third and final chapter in the theoretical overview “Standard language ideology and the history of Romance–Germanic encounters” covers the importance of standard language ideologies in the language historiography of the Low Countries. Ulrike Vogl provides evidence for the underlying standard language ideology in the historiography of the Romance–Germanic border region in Belgium. More specifically, she uses a discourse analytical approach on a corpus of four textbooks on the external history of Dutch, which share common ground regarding the content, target audience and professional background of the authors. In order to illustrate how a present-day standard language perspective has shaped common but biased views on language, she identifies two discourse models: the “decay of Dutch in the South in the shadow of French” and “monolingual Flanders”, linked respectively to the French annexation of the Southern Low Countries and to the federalisation process in Belgium. Both models represent ways of simplifying the complex history of Romance–Germanic encounters in the South of the Low Countries through the use of elements of standard language ideology, such as the “ideology of the hierarchisation of varieties”, the “ideology of correctness” and the “one-nation-one-language ideology” as their conceptual basis, which also means that practices deviating from this ideal tend to be hidden. Vogl nonetheless recognises that the books leave a little room for the alternative discourse model of a “super diverse Belgium”, which fits in with some characterisations of the linguistic situation in Brussels.

4 Case studies from past to present

The three introductory chapters set the theoretical and methodological stage for the subsequent seven case studies. In the individual case studies, the authors deal with important sites of Romance–Germanic contact along the language border, such as Luxembourg (Horner and Weber), the Northern Netherlands (Frijhoff; Rutten, Vosters and Van der Wal), Flanders (Peersman; Rutten, Vosters and Van der Wal), the cities of Brussels (Janssens and Vaesen) and Maastricht (Kessels-van der Heijde), and the German-speaking community in Belgium (Boemer and Darquennes). Moreover, the volume is structured along a diachronic axis, showing how language contact and conflict operated in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (Peersman; Frijhoff), the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Rutten, Vosters and Van der Wal; Kessels-van der Heijde) and throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Boemer and Darquennes; Horner and Weber; Janssens and Vaesen). The chapters discuss a variety of topics and themes, many of which display a remarkable diachronic stability, such as the interplay of multilingualism and group identities, the educational practices and policies focused on the management of multilingualism, and the close connection between language contact and language conflict.

4.1 Multilingualism and nationhood

Throughout the history of the Low Countries, language, or, more precisely, linguistic difference has been employed as a tool to create group identities, including national identities, feeding on what Watts calls the “essentialist hypostasisation” of both language and group identity. Even in relatively early medieval sources, identity boundaries separating various groups of individuals are drawn along linguistic lines. This theme is addressed by Vogl (cf. above), and is also at the heart of various case studies in the second part of the volume. In “Constructing identity: language and identity in the narration of the Franco-Flemish conflict (1297–1307)”, Catharina Peersman presents a contrastive analysis of narrative sources predating 1330. She examines the use and perception of languages in chronicles written in Latin, Old French and Middle Dutch. The common ground shared by these sources is their description of the Franco-Flemish conflict, from either a Flemish or a French point of view. Given the fact that one of the central events, the 1302 battle of Courtrai, is a highly politicised cornerstone of present-day Flemish identity, the analysis aims at determining whether and to what degree the actual battle contributed to the creation of a Flemish identity in the aftermath of the battle. To that objective, Peersman uses implicit and explicit textual markers as proxies for historical language attitudes. Combining a qualitative analysis of the narrated period 1207–1307 with a quantitative analysis of the general identifiers in the coverage of 1302, she argues that identity, on both sides, is implicitly but strongly linked to language, or rather to specific usages of the language of the “other” within clearly defined contextual boundaries, as is illustrated by loanwords and code-switching. The analysis of the identifiers complements these findings, but also opens up possible leads suggesting that the link between language and identity was present before the definition of 1302 as the “national” battle in the textual tradition and before the formation of nationstates as a larger sociolinguistic landmark.

The French language as the language of the “other” remains an important theme in subsequent periods. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular, a lively discourse on the so-called frenchification of the Netherlands comes into being. Willem Frijhoff, in his chapter on “Multilingualism and the challenge of frenchification in the early modern Dutch Republic” discusses the position of French and other languages of international communication vis-à-vis Dutch in the seventeenth-century Northern Low Countries. The frenchification hypothesis has long dominated Dutch cultural history. The increase of the use of the French language and the introduction of French manners have been made responsible for Holland’s perceived decline as an independent power and a culturally innovative nation during the late seventeent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• Author information
• Catharina Peersman, Gijsbert Rutten and Rik Vosters: Chapter 1 Romance–Germanic encounters along the language border: past, present and future
• Part I: Theoretical and historical overview
• Part II: The Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
• Part III: The 18th and 19th centuries
• Part IV: The 20th and 21st centuries
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Index