Language as an essential feature of Dutch identity. In short, that is the research object of Vidi winner Gijsbert Rutten, linguist at Leiden University. He focuses on the period 1750-1850:“It is a key period because then the language-political and nationalistic context becomes so prominent. The nation states are formed. More than ever, discussions about language are arising in literary societies. In particular, the link between language and people is very eighteenth-century:does language reflect the character of a people?”
The emergence of the Dutch standard language is often situated in the seventeenth century, with writers such as Vondel and Hooft, and culminating in the Statenbijbelvertaling in 1637. According to Rutten, there is something to be said for this:“You can wonder whether in the seventeenth century century is already a standard language. The differences between the texts we know from that time are at least as great as the similarities. It is evident that the language is somewhat more uniform in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth century, and somewhat more uniform in the sixteenth century than in the fifteenth century. But in the eighteenth century everything accelerated. Then the idea very clearly arises:we need one language for our people.”
Literary Societies
And that idea originated in the literary societies, which left an important mark on politics in the eighteenth century, says Rutten. “The people who are in those societies often also fulfill political functions. In a sense, it is even one circuit of people who have studied in Leiden.” The discussion about a unitary language is being conducted by, among others, Petrus Weiland and Matthijs Siegenbeek. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this resulted in real language politics. Then the government decides that official spelling and grammar are needed. “And then it is the same Siegenbeek and Weiland who design the spelling and grammar. Siegenbeek had been professor of Dutch since 1797, one of the first in the language area. His spelling appeared in 1804. Weiland's grammar appeared a year later, in 1805.”
At school:as standard as possible
On the one hand, Rutten wants to use his Vidi grant to investigate how exactly the idea of this standard language arose in the context of nationalism. On the other hand, he wants to look at how that language was subsequently introduced and imposed, especially in education. “The usual colloquial language at that time is the dialect, Dutch should be taught in general at school. This creates a sharp division between general Dutch – also called Low German at that time – and what people actually speak. The standard is put forward as something you should know; forget the non-standard. The question is whether children at school were made aware of that distinction and how this was done. My hypothesis is that they should talk as standard as possible.”
To investigate these questions, Rutten wants to draw on the many archival sources available for education. For example, school books and magazines for teachers have been preserved, but also minutes of so-called teachers' associations, correspondence from teachers and inspection reports. Many of these sources have not yet been researched, the researcher knows, with a few exceptions:“Education historians have already done a lot of work in Groningen and Drenthe:the archive material has already been exposed to some extent. I think it would be interesting to look especially at non-Randurban areas. Because there the difference between the colloquial language and the standard was greater. The situation of Frisian is of course very special. Frisian was still seen as a dialect and not as an independent language. There was, however, a vague awareness of the Frisian writing tradition from the Middle Ages. But Frisian was only redefined in the nineteenth century by the Frisian movement.”
Spelling Battle
Finally, a third project looks at the success of language policy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, after the introduction of official spelling and grammar. “They were official, in that they were ordained by the government. There were no laws mandating its use. But there was a very urgent advice to both education and officials to use them.” The situation was therefore more or less comparable to now:the Green Book is also mandatory for government and education, but there are no sanctions if a civil servant does not comply with it.
The spelling battle that we know from 2005 between supporters of the Green and the White Book is not new either, Rutten explains:“There was opposition to Siegenbeek in particular from the literary circle. The writer Bilderdijk had his own spelling system and that also had his followers:writers who insisted on spelling Bilderdijkian. In Belgium there was resistance to Siegenbeek anyway. There was already a political division then, with the exception of the period 1815-1830.” But many studies have already been published about this, Rutten adds. And that immediately explains why his research is limited to the Northern Netherlands:“The Southern Netherlands has a rich tradition of research into language politics in the nineteenth century. Not at all here in the Netherlands, so it's about time.”