Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - Volume 138, Issue 4, 2022

The present paper seeks to shed light on the language-ideological dynamics of contemporary (1995-2018) Belgian media discourses that present multilingualism as a problem. Conceiving of the media as meaningful actors in (re)producing, recontextualising and naturalising language-ideological discourses, we analyse a corpus of 170 French- and Dutch-medium press articles containing multilingualism-as-problem orientations. Following the Discourse-Historical Approach, thematic and critical-pragmatic analyses were conducted of (1) the news topics in which multilingualism can be identified as a problem and (2) the linguistic mechanisms through which that ‘problem’ is discursively constructed. Results point to three key elements: discourses of victimhood, teleological perspectives on language justice and language history, and (false) dilemmas opposing multilingualism to the community language. These characteristics will emphasise the persistence and instrumentalisation of standard language ideology and ideals of societal monolingualism rooted in Belgian history. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the role of sociolinguistic research in engaging with language ideologies in public language debate.

Schultze and Müller were two well-known cartoon figures who commented on German (Prussian) society and politics in the satirical magazine Kladderadatsch, from 1848 onwards. Their petty bourgeois mindset allowed them to criticize the absurdity of everyday life. Kladderadatsch and its main characters were imitated in Dutch satirical magazines: in Uilenspiegel, Kwik and Kwak engaged in similar dialogues as Schultze and Müller, whereas Humoristisch Album published the travel story of Koen Verklat, who just as Schultze and Müller travelled abroad to marvel at anything that was different from life back home. The Dutch imitations can be studied as cases of Kulturtransfer, the methodology of which can be refined by using the concept of scenography, as introduced by Dominique Maingueneau in his discourse analysis. The help of imagology is needed to understand Dutch reactions to the booklet Schultze und Müller in Holland, which depicted the Netherlands and its inhabitants in a horribly negative way.