Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 25, Issue 2-3, 2020

The influence of prescriptivism on Dutch

Weerman (2003) unequivocally rejected the possibility for language to be malleable. At the time, there was little empirical research to challenge or support this claim. Over the last two decades, however, a fairly large body of research has delved into this issue. In light of this, we review some of Weerman’s views, and discuss new findings of the recent literature, both for Dutch and other languages. We show how new methods and insights have led to a re-evaluation of the effects of prescriptivism. We furthermore argue that, rather than categorically dismissing effects of prescriptivism, researchers should focus on case studies with different parameters, including linguistic level, prohibition strength and time period.

Natiolectisms in crime fiction. Language variation in subtitles

Sarah Van Hoof and Bram Vandekerckhove (2013) studied linguistic variation in a diachronic corpus of television series broadcast by the Flemish public service broadcaster (VRT). To establish whether there had been a decrease in oral standard Dutch language usage between the late 1970s and the late 2000s, they scrutinised the actors’ rendition of their scripts. They found that less Standard Dutch, but also less dialects were used in the Dutch-language fiction of the late 2000s. The latter contained more colloquial Belgian Dutch, the so-called ‘in-between’ variety (‘tussentaal’). While such sociolinguistic research into local Dutch-language fiction is highly interesting, it is also important to study linguistic variation in translated foreign fiction, as Dutch speakers are exposed a lot to such (audiovisual) translations. This article presents the results of a lexical analysis of a diachronic corpus of crime fiction subtitles (De Ridder 2015). These were broadcast by the VRT before and after their language policy changed in favour of an adherence to the Belgian, rather than the Netherlandic Dutch standard. The aim is to establish whether this resulted in an increase of Belgian Dutch lexis in their subtitles. Remarkably, in each period under scrutiny, in fact, more Netherlandic Dutch lexis was retrieved.

More international, collective, gender diverse

This contribution sheds light on three tendencies in the history of the journal Dutch Linguistics: the increase of Belgian authors, of female authors and of co-authors.

Early perspectives on language acquisition

Early psycholinguistics used to be a neglected area, due to the spectacular restart of the discipline during the 1950s and 1960s. In an article published in Nederlandse Taalkunde 10 (2005), Marijke van der Wal and Ariane van Santen contribute to a correction of this disbalance by discussing early 20^th-century Dutch research into language acquisition. Their discussion of Van Ginneken’s De Roman van een kleuter (The story of a toddler) (1917) and Rombouts’s 1919 supplement to this book shows that, in those days, a relatively advanced degree of empirical knowledge about developmental stages in child language and awareness of related, partially time-bound, theoretical issues had already been attained.

In a special issue of Nederlandse Taalkunde (vol. 13(2), 2008), eight discussants commented on the so-called written language bias thesis, which claims that in literate societies, both naive language users and linguists perceive spoken language in terms of units that are in fact properties of writing: letters, words, and sentences. This thesis was discussed and defended in a lengthy book from 2006, Homo loquens en homo scribens, written by A. Kraak (1928-2005). The special issue contained a spectrum of opinions pro and contra the thesis. The present article looks back at that discussion and tries to bring it to a new level, making use of ideas brought in by Davidson (2019). That article helps to understand why opinions can be so diverse: They address different aspects of a reality that is rather complex. The idea that writing is simply the rendering of spoken language in another medium is not doing justice to this complex reality. As Davidson argues, a proper treatment of the written language bias issue is only possible in a new theoretical perspective.

In 2003, Theo Janssen wrote a contribution for Nederlandse Taalkunde [Dutch Linguistics] about the incorporation of linguistic knowledge into the school subject of Dutch Language and Literature, hoping thus to enrich the content of the school subject and making it more inspiring. In our contribution we discuss the great relevance of Janssen's contribution, and we show that his plea is still extremely topical. In addition, we discuss some recent developments, and we particularly draw attention to the complex relationship between academic linguistics and the related school subject.