The first thing to note is that Wim Vandenbussche bribes his audiences with Belgian chocolates! And not a common variety either. Good quality Belgian pralines. He also lards his talks with pesonal anecdotes, such as his own English professors' insistence on the use of Received Pronunciation when he was an undergraduate. Memories of my own first year as a student of English at that other Vrije Universiteit, in Amsterdam. We, too, had to acquire an accent that is used by less than 2% of the UK population and which I lost three years later within months of arriving as a Harting scholar in Manchester.
The talk about the standardisation of Dutch was a good introduction to comparative standardology and its history as a theoretical framework. It discussed standardisation in various languages and along the way gave an excellent potted history of Norwegian standardisation (when discussing Haugen's work) and of the Low Countries since the late 16th century. Wim critiqued a large number of authors and throughout the seminar his big message was this: for much of history 99% of the people have ignored the rules of standard languages, and yet there is no chaos. The role of language as social (upward) mobiliser has become important only in the last couple of centuries. Early in the 19th century upper classes started to apply the rules seriously, followed by the middle and lower classes by 50-100 year intervals. Why this happened at that particular time all over Europe is not an easy question to answer (so it was good that one of the students asked), but the industrial revolution plays a role, as does the increased importance of written communication and education.
The talk about the Dutch-French language border was an attempt to explain the present political situation in Belgium. Timely, because it followed the announcement the previous evening that there was a new Belgian federal government, which had meant that Wim had needed to do some quick rewriting. We learnt something about Belgium's parliamentary structure and were treated to a (rather long) BBC clip visiting all seven parliaments in Belgium, including the European parliament. Wim gave a historical overview since 1962 and used a lot of quotes from the foreign press about Belgium's political divide and usually claiming that the country is about the fall apart. Again we went back to the Burgundian empire at the end of 14th century and raced through time to the early 19th century, along the way busting several myths created by traditional language historians,. It slowed down for the history of Dutch vs. French in the last 200 years. And we learnt a good French expression from Quebec that applies equally well to the Belgian language situation: Les deux solitudes. The historical overview concluded with a critique of the present situation, especially in Brussels, where there are still a lot of bilinguals. There are stable voting patterns in Dutch language communities around Brussels, but in the communities with facilities for French speakers numbers of French voters is going up, indicating that much feared shifts in population are largely exaggerated. Most importantly, there is a major power shift to speakers of other languages than French and Dutch in Brussels, which present politics hardly seems to notice.
Wednesday was an exciting day for Dutch in Sheffield and both talks attracted good audiences. The first was was spiced up by some excellent critical questions from students who kept Wim thinking on his feet. It is sure to have provided the necessary inspiration for student projects and essays later this year. The second one was attended by people from all over university and in fact all students of Dutch should have attended this as a quick introduction to the linguistic and political situation in Belgium. You can reread a step by step account of it on Twitter: @FrenchSheffield.
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