Prescriptivism between the devil and the deep blue sea

Ondertitel:Competing language norms in the Southern Low Countries

The (temporary) political reunion of the Northern and Southern parts of the Dutch language area under King William I in the early 19th century brought about a stream of metalinguistic publications discussing language issues, particularly in the Southern Low Countries. Apart from many language political pamphlets, this period also witnessed a remarkable number of publications comparing the written language norms of the Northern Netherlands (so-called ‘Hollandic’) with those of the South (so-called ‘Flemish’). An interesting example is the 1823 text entitled Iets over de Hollandsche tael, noch voor, noch tegen [‘Something about the Hollandic language, neither in favor, nor against it’], published anonymously by the Ghent-based attorney J.B. Cannaert. In this work, he provides his readers with an extensive survey of the most salient linguistic North-South differences, claiming to meet a pressing need among Southern readers to quickly and efficiently become familiarized with the Hollandic language norms. In spite of his assertion to objectively present different variants alongside each other, Cannaert clearly prefers and often explicitly prescribes the Northern forms.
The work of Cannaert and other early proponents of the Northern Dutch standard in the Southern Low Countries is interesting, because it gives us a unique insight into the ongoing standardization process in the Southern Netherlands. Prescriptivist authors present the Northern variety of the language as the most sophisticated and most desirable one, while Southern varieties of Dutch are framed in a discourse of ‘language decay’. We will discuss the sociolinguistic context in which such prescriptivist works arose, and take a closer look at Cannaert (1823) as a case in point. More specifically, we will examine which variants he identified as salient and prototypically Southern. Next, we will hold a selection of these features against the light of actual usage, by investigating their occurrence in a corpus of non-literary manuscripts from the period. Based on our findings, we will discuss how Southern prescriptivism was caught in between opposing Northern and Southern language norms, often resulting in a discrepancy between metalinguistic remarks and discussions on the one hand, and actual language use on the other hand.

ISBN:9781783096503

Jaar van publicatie:2016

Trefwoorden:historical sociolinguistics, prescriptivism, language norms, language usage, Dutch