STRICTLY LANGUAGE
Sociolinguistics, Language Attitudes, Language Ideologies FEBRUARY 9, 2021
Dutch and/or French? Understanding the
historical-sociolinguistic dynamics
behind language choice
ANDREAS KROGULLLEIDEN UNIVERSITY
Historical multilingualism has emerged as one of the ‘hot topics’ in
historical sociolinguistics, as demonstrated by a number of key publications in the past decades (see Rutten et al. 2017 for an introductory overview). Also building on previous research projects at Leiden University, filling major gaps in the sociolinguistic history of Dutch, our ongoing ‘Pardon my French?’ project focuses on an important, yet still understudied chapter in the multilingual history of the Netherlands: Dutch-French language contact in the Early and Late Modern period.
Back then, as elsewhere in Europe, the French language played a crucial role in the Netherlands. Its status could be compared to that of English nowadays, or that of Latin in the Middle Ages. What we further learn from textbook accounts of Dutch language history is (1) that many French loans entered the Dutch lexicon and grammar, (2) that French became a
dominant language in various societal domains, and (3) that the
‘Frenchification’ of Dutch was heavily criticised in metalinguistic debates. Empirical evidence, however, is surprisingly sparse to either confirm or debunk these traditional assumptions about the influence of French in the Netherlands (see Frijhoff 2015). Therefore, our aim with ‘Pardon my
French?’ is to critically study the Dutch-French contact situation with respect to three aspects: language use, language choice, as well as language attitudes and ideologies.
Together with my colleague Jill Puttaert, I’m currently looking more closely at Dutch-French language choice, inspired by previous studies on ‘European francophonie’ (see the edited volume by Rjéoutski et al. 2014). This pan-European phenomenon can be loosely defined as the practice of French outside France, where it wasn’t the population’s mother tongue but widely used as a second or foreign language. Besides the utilitarian function of French as a European lingua franca, its practice was also a social and cultural phenomenon. The literature discusses a multitude of overlapping
concepts, from the language of distinction to the language of the ‘honnête homme’ and the language of cosmopolitanism, all reflecting the widespread association of French with prestige and the elite, especially in the 17th and
18th centuries. The use of French in elite circles has also been referred to as
the language of intimacy in different types of ego-documents (see the edited volume by van Strien-Chardonneau & Kok-Escalle 2016).
Against this background, the private domain is certainly one of the most intriguing societal domains to examine. Over the past months, we’ve already collected a first batch of private letters, from various cities and
spanning four centuries, kept in Dutch archives. Family correspondence is a particularly promising source for the study of language choice, as it reveals the sociolinguistic behaviour of ‘real’ historical individuals in relation to their most intimate network. Trying to answer ‘Who wrote what language to whom and when?’, in reference to Fishman’s (1965) famous question, we want to understand the social factors affecting language choice, in
situations when a choice could actually be made (that is, by potentially multilingual individuals/families). In our database of family
correspondence (a work in progress!), we consider an extensive set of metadata, including information on the letter (such as date, place, and – importantly – language(s)), biographical information of the letter writer, but also the sender–addressee relationship, accounting for different familial relationships, gender constellations, and so on. The patterns emerging from all these sociolinguistic factors might not be all that meaningful on a smaller scale, but hopefully they will be when we have a substantial database
Methodologically, though, studying language choice in such a systematic and large-scale manner has proven to be more challenging than it seems. This nicely adds to the very practical challenges of efficient data collection during a pandemic. Apart from the natural selection that goes along with the patchy nature of historical data (for instance, you’ll find considerably more letters in 19th-century family archives than in 16th-century ones), plenty
of methodological choices have to be made. Which families should be
selected, and which family members? Which letters by a certain writer, how many, and written to whom? Our main challenge thus lies in the ‘narrowing down’ and measurable representation of individual language choices in a vast and unevenly distributed amount of archival material.
Issues related to linguistic categorisations are equally challenging, again searching for a healthy balance between accuracy and practicability. While it may be tempting to fall into the ‘monolingual’ trap of using binary labels (‘Dutch’ versus ‘French’), historical multilingualism is obviously more complex than that. We’ve come across a diverse palette of practices in private letters, ranging from simple and formulaic Adieu greetings, to quotes from books (Ik zal maar zeggen zoo als Martine de meid in les femmes Savantes “quand on se fait entendre, on parle toujours bien”) and more ‘creative’ code-switching (je suis sur que Henriette er zig niet scheef aan draagen zal car elle me ressemble elle n’aime pas van die kleine gevilde konyntjes), to cases where one half of a letter is written in Dutch, and the other in French. Always keeping in mind that our research method has to be feasible, we need to carefully think about where to draw the line between (primarily) ‘Dutch’ or ‘French’ texts on the one hand, and
‘multilingual’ texts on the other.
In sum, we’ve learnt from the process so far that studying language choice in a historical setting of multilingualism is not a straightforward task. In the meantime, we’ve been working on a methodological framework that allows for a fine-grained investigation of the sociolinguistic dynamics behind language choice in the past. We can’t wait to get started with the analyses and contribute to (re-)writing this chapter in the multilingual history of the Netherlands – something to look forward to in 2021!
Andreas Krogull is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leiden University
Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). His research focuses on historical
sociolinguistics, multilingualism, standardization, and language policy and ideologies, particularly in the history of Dutch.
References
Fishman, J.A. 1965. Who speaks what language to whom and when? La Linguistique 1: 67–88.
Frijhoff, W. 2015. Multilingualism and the challenge of frenchification in the early modern Dutch Republic. In: Peersman, C., G. Rutten & R. Vosters (eds), Past, Present and Future of a Language Border. Germanic-Romance Encounters in the Low Countries. Berlin: De Gruyter, 19–37.
Rjéoutski, V., G. Argent & D. Offord (eds). 2014. European Francophonie. The Social, Political and Cultural History of an International Prestige Language. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Rutten, G., J. Salmons, W. Vandenbussche & R. Vosters. 2017. Unraveling multilingualism in times past. The interplay of language contact, language use and language planning. Sociolinguistica 31 (1), 9–20.
van Strien-Chardonneau, M. & M.-C. Kok-Escalle (eds). 2016. French as Language of Intimacy in the Modern Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
