Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Current researchPenn Dutch Studies ColloquiumClick here for more information. Postdoctoral researchFoundations for a European social history of languageProject leader: prof. dr. Wim Vandenbussche 2012 - 2013 Funded by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel The long nineteenth century was the century of language planning in Europe par excellence. Across the continent, situations of language contact and processes of state and nation building resulted in unprecedented language planning activity, affecting both the structure of these languages and their status. Over the past fifteen years, the VUB team has been involved in one 'micro' case study in this respect: the social history of Dutch language planning in Belgium. Combining a detailed analysis of original language planning documents on the one hand, and corpora of actual language use from various social classes on the other, our team's work has fundamentally challenged and changed traditional conceptions and beliefs about this specific sociolinguistic history. We were further been able to challenge a series of generally accepted 'truths' about linguistic discrimination and oppression that still serve as the cornerstone for present-day policy in Belgium. In the absence of a solid historical-sociolinguistic basis for the oft called for European language policy nowadays, we have the ambition to provide a solid foundation for a true European social language history, adopting and expanding our 'local' Belgian expertise on a Europe-wide scale. By focusing on select case studies and thorough comparisons with what we know already about the Low Countries, we intend to investigate a series of key variables in nineteenth-century language planning accross Europe, focusing on language-internal aspects and corpus planning, as well as language-external factors and status planning. For both corpus and status planning, we wish to trace and contextualize the influence of a series of language planners and 'standardisation actors' including (but not limited to) printers, centres of political power, practices of commerce and trade, literary authors, schools, language academies and councils, academics and the media. Each of these aspects will furthermore be systematically contextualised in the development of local 'standard language ideologies' at the time, i.e. the construction of national identities through language norms and linguistic behaviour. The interplay of these Europe-wide language ideologies with the conflicting developments of local national identies and an overarching 'European identity' should, finally, allow us to reach a better and more profound understanding of the challenges and very nature of Europe’s multilingual puzzle today. More specific information on this project will follow in the course of 2012.
PhD ResearchLanguage use, language norms and linguistic identities in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. A historical sociolinguistic perspective on Southern Dutch in the early nineteenth century.Advisor: prof. dr. Wim Vandenbussche 2008 - 2011 Funded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO - Vlaanderen) After more than 200 years of political separation, the Southern and the Northern Low Countries were united once more in 1814 as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, under the reign of King William I. This short period of time together, before the Belgian independance in 1830, is traditionally considered to have been crucial for the status, form, and even survival of the Dutch language in Flanders. Whereas we know a fair deal about the position of Dutch in various domains of public life (i.e. the opposition Dutch-French), considerably less attention has been given to the actual form of the language, especially as to how it was embedded in the unusual sociolinguistic landscape of the time. i. Language and the normative tradition Around the time of the reunion, two writing traditions usually regarded as different came into close contact, giving rise to intense spelling debates in Flanders. On the one hand, the North had had an official orthography since 1804, whereas competing spelling systems existed in the South. A first aim of the research is to uncover to what extent there was (or had been) a uniform normative tradition in the southern provinces. Can we indeed observe "as many ways of spelling, as there [were] people who worked on improving the spelling” (Behaegel 1817: 250), or can we distinguish a southern as opposed to a northern tradition? By gathering and analysing a large number of grammars, orthographies and schoolbooks that were being used during the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, I hope to construct a solid normative framework, which can be used as a basis for the analysis of the corpus material. ii. Language and identity From the spelling debates at the time, it is obvious that orthographical features came to express strong social, regional and even religious identities. Grammarians, journalists, essayists and literary authors took part in the debate about the desirability of a joint Dutch language, whereas others felt the need to affirm a distinctly different Belgian identity, putting forward Flemish as a separate and independent language. The second aim of the research focuses on the role of language and language varieties in society, and the metalinguistic discourse surrounding them. How can we interpret the polemics about the form of Dutch in Flanders, and how does this relate to the later opposition between so-called particularists, striving for a separate 'Flemish' language, and the so-called integrationists, who emphasized the linguistic unity between North and South? Which actual linguistic differences and/or similarities were being put to the fore, and how does this fit into the socio-political context — can, for instance, the acceptance or rejection of several features of northern standard Dutch be interpreted as a marker of regional or political identities? iii. Language in use The third and most important aspect of my research concerns actual language use. In an integrated approach, I will try to link up both the findings from the normative framework and from the metalinguistic discourse, and compare them to actual linguistic usage, as represented in a specially compiled corpus of court files, including police reports, witness interrogation reports, and high court indictments. This corpus, consisting of handwritten documents in all varieties of Dutch, contains transcribed and annotated material from central and peripheral towns from each of the Flemish provinces, allowing for broad regional comparisons. Also, there is a built-in diachronical dimension, with manuscripts from 1823 and 1829, in order to investigate the language use at the onset of the Dutchification policy of King William I, and shortly before the end of the political union in 1830. Overall, I hope to sketch an overview of the form of the language being used at the time in different non-literary sources, and see how this relates to the claims of 'absolute linguistic chaos', where Dutch in Flanders is considered to be nothing more than a collection of mutually unintelligible dialects being used in writing. For more background information on the project, see recent publications here.
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Rik Vosters
Vrije Universiteit Brussel • Centrum voor Linguïstiek • Pleinlaan 2 • 1050 Brussel • Belgium
Tel.: 02 629.37.89 • Fax: 02 629.36.84 • Rik.Vosters@vub.ac.be