Neutrality as a shared space

To understand how a supralocal form of written Dutch became a supposedly neu-tral standard variety, the discursive changes in the concept of neuneu-trality need to be historicised. The ‘unmarked’ form of neutrality that characterises the nationalist period, developed from an earlier period in which neutrality was mainly seen as ‘a shared space’ of supralocal forms. European languages have been subject to pro-cesses of supralocalisation since the Middle Ages (cf. e.g. Kloss 1952; Haugen 1966;

Lodge 1993; Linn & McLelland 2002; Deumert & Vandenbussche 2003). Focusing on Dutch metalinguistic discourse from the sixteenth century to the early eight-eenth century, I argue that in Late Medieval and Early Modern times, the supralo-calisation of specific forms entails neutrality as a shared space. This does not mean that ideological notions such as the mother tongue, hierarchisation and linguistic polish, cultivation or perfection (Watts 2011: 134; Weber & Horner 2012: 16–19) do not play a role. On the contrary, these are often applied to various forms and varieties and in particular to the allegedly neutral variety without, however, losing sight of its status as an addition to the already available repertoire. I also discuss the two kinds of conscious koine constructions referred to in Section 6.3, viz. neutrality as patchwork and neutrality through erasure.

6.4.1 From regionality to neutrality as patchwork

The first metalinguistic works produced in the Low Countries date back to the six-teenth century. One of the earliest publications is Lambrecht (1550), in which the author argues for a phonetic spelling system, which he develops on the basis of his own Flemish pronunciation. Lambrecht explicitly states that he does not aim for a uniform orthography to be used throughout the language area (Dibbets 1977: 24).

Instead, he argues that his phonetic spelling should be adopted throughout the language area, so that speakers from various regions will get to know each oth-er’s pronunciation. In practice, this means that people from Brabant and Flanders should write ja ‘yes’, whereas people from the region of Zeeland ought to write jae, reflecting their slightly more palatal pronunciation of this phoneme (Dibbets 1977: 24). The shared space developed by Lambrecht consists of orthographical principles that everybody can apply to their own pronunciation.

Other spelling guides from the same period are often less explicit about the aims with respect to the larger language area. Instead, they focus on the orthogra-phy of their own regional variety. Sexagius (1576) uses as the target variety of his orthographical description the Brabant dialects that he knew growing up and living in Brussels and Mechlin (van der Sijs 2004: 25). He does not aim for a uniform spelling for all varieties of Dutch.

The earliest Dutch orthographical texts were written in the 1530s by some-one called Varenbraken. The two manuscripts were never published and were only edited in the late twentieth century (Braekman 1978). Almost nothing is known about the author or the manuscripts, but it is clear from the language that they were produced in the southern parts of West Flanders or in French Flanders (Braekman 1978: 303). Like Sexagius’ and Lambrecht’s after him, Varenbraken’s orthography is regionally marked and primarily meant for local/regional usage. Obviously, com-mentators such as Varenbraken, Lambrecht and Sexagius were aware of the fact that the Dutch language area is far greater than their home town and its surround-ings. However, it is in the fullest awareness of the actual variety of Dutches that these commentators try to fix but one of these varieties. To the extent that their phonetic spelling systems are applicable to other varieties that make use of similar phoneme inventories, that is, to the extent that the spelling systems can be subject to supralocalisation, they engage in the construction of a neutral tool for written interdialectal communication.

In the same period, de Heuiter (1581) came out. He mentions earlier spelling books, such as Sexagius’, aimed at regional spelling systems, while his own goal is to create a spelling for the whole language area (de Heuiter 1581: 29–30, cf.

Dibbets 1968: 174–176). De Heuiter had travelled a lot in the Low Countries: born and bred in the south of Holland (Delft, Leiden), he had spent time in Brabant

(Mechlin, Brussels) and Flanders (Jabbeke near Bruges). For various reasons he crit-icises the spoken language in these regions as well as the varieties used in Zeeland and Guelders, but he also identifies the admirable aspects of all these varieties (de Heuiter 1581: 93–95; Dibbets 1968: 174–175). In trying to render Dutch as een ge-meingelde Tale ‘a mixed language’, he claims that he has forged (gesmeet) his Dutch out of Brabantic, Flemish, Hollandic, Guelderish and Kleverlandish (de Heuiter 1581: 93). Dibbets (1968: 175–176) states that his orthography indeed incorporates elements typical of Holland, Brabant and Flanders, with perhaps a slight preference for Hollandic spellings. De Heuiter’s reference to the ancient Greeks with their four languages, viz. “Ionica, Attica, Dorica, Aeölica, die vijfste noh daer uit gesmeet hebben / die zij nommen Gemeen tale”, that is, ‘Ionica, Attica, Dorica, Aeölica, and who have forged the fifth out of these, which they call common language’ confirms his goal to create a neutral variety through patchwork.

Similar efforts to create neutrality as patchwork are found in translations from the Bible (van der Sijs 2004: 120–124). Both the 1556 translation by Utenhove and the so-called Deux-Aes Bible of 1561–1562 combine elements that are, in hindsight, considered to be Dutch and German, respectively. Utenhove, for example, uses datives in -m, such as am, dem, in allem, which are rare in the history of Dutch.

The Deux-Aes Bible abounds with lexical items that sound markedly Low or High German rather than Dutch (e.g. gantsch ende gaer ‘entirely’). Both translations were produced in the now German town of Emden in East Frisia, to which western Dutch Protestants had fled. This prompted the translators to create a patchwork of western and eastern continental West Germanic forms, but it also suggests that their concept of the Dutch and/or German language area(s) was perhaps quite different from the present.

6.4.2 The mother tongue and hierarchisation

The first fully-fledged grammar of Dutch is the anonymously published Twe-spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst (‘Dialogue on Dutch grammar’, 1584). As argued in 6.4.1, this period is characterised by regionally oriented metalinguistic texts as well as by texts in which a patchwork of forms is created to establish neutrality as a shared space. Particularly the patchwork of western and eastern variants suggests that authors are aware of the fact that their locality is part of a larger language area.

But how large is this language area? Does it include the present-day Dutch and German countries? Discussing the concept of Dutch in the Twe-spraack, Dibbets (1985: 501–511) points out that the language area that the authors consider them-selves part of stretches from Bruges in the southwest of the present-day Dutch language area to Riga in Latvia and even further to Tallinn in Estonia (Twe-spraack

1584: 110). De Grauwe (2002) argues that this was a common way of thinking about continental West Germanic in Late Medieval and Early Modern times. The two main divisions in the linguistic landscape of Europe were 1. Germanic vs Romance, and 2. within Germanic, upper or high German vs lower German, where upper German refers to the southern varieties used in the south of present-day Germany and in Switzerland and Austria, and low German, sometimes also called Nederlands, refers to the area from Dunkirk in the north of France (which was largely neer-landophone well into the seventeenth century) to Tallinn. Reval, as the current capital of Estonia was often called, is usually considered the northernmost city of the Hansa, which explains the historical importance of Germanic varieties in the Baltic area generally.

These ideas about onze moeders taal ‘our mother’s tongue’ (Twe-spraack 1584: A2^v) and its place in Europe gain significance against the background of two fundamental linguistic hierarchies. The first is external and refers to the placement of Germanic varieties above Romance varieties, including Latin, and often also above Greek and Hebrew. The position was famously defended by Becanus in his Origines Antwerpianae of 1569, in which he claimed that Dutch was the original language, i.e. the language of paradise; the authors of the Twe-spraack explicitly referred to Becanus (Dibbets 1985: 502). The comparison with the mostly nega-tively evaluated Romance varieties remained very common in Dutch metalinguis-tic discourse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (van der Wal 1995a: 43;

Rutten 2006: 307–309). A popular argument for the superiority of Dutch was the abundance of monosyllabic words, an indication of its old age and originality (van der Wal 1995a: 48–52). The argument was picked up by Schottelius in his 1663 Ausfürliche Arbeit von der Teutschen HaubtSprache (van der Wal 1995b). Romance languages were said to have fewer monosyllabic words. Another argument was put forward by the grammarian van Geesdalle (1700: 4*1^r), who claimed that Dutch followed the order of thought, thereby appropriating the well-known argument about the ordre logique and the ordre naturel familiar from French metalinguistic discourse of the time (Swiggers 1984).

The broad concept of the mother tongue, spanning the present-day Dutch and Low German language areas as well as the Germanic varieties used in Poland and the Baltic area, was not a uniform and homogeneous block. The second, internal hierarchy addresses the relative prestige of the various varieties within the conti-nental West Germanic area. According to the Twe-spraack, the best Germanic is found in Meissen (near Dresden), from where it was brought to the Low Countries.

Here, the Twe-spraack relies on similar ideas expressed in German metalinguistic discourse, in which Saxon dialects have been idealised from at least the fifteenth century onwards (Dibbets 1985: 503).

In the seventeenth century, the hierarchisation of varieties of Dutch remained topical, especially in the then very popular genre of farces. Well-known examples from the history of Dutch literature include Warenar (1617) by P. C. Hooft, the Spaansche Brabander Jerolimo (1618) by G. A. Bredero, and Trijntje Cornelis (1657) by Constantijn Huygens. In Warenar, Hooft uses linguistic means to characterise the Amsterdam characters. Bredero’s play, which is set in Amsterdam, is about immigrants from Brabant, and he signals their southernness by their language.

Huygens was based in Holland, but his family came from the south. His play Trijntje Cornelis is set in Antwerp in the Brabant area, and the characters are marked by their Brabantic language. All three plays are set in socio-economically modest cir-cles, very different from the upper and upper-middle ranks to which the authors and the audience belonged. De Vooys (1970: 103) argues that neither Hooft nor Bredero considered local vernaculars unworthy of being used in artistic works. It is significant, however, that they only used markedly local forms in farces, not in more serious plays nor in lyrical poetry. It is also significant that these local forms are easily detectable, as it implies the relative neutrality of the other linguistic forms.

There clearly was an awareness of local and supralocal forms, and local forms were considered more appropriate for farces set in a socially lower environment. There is thus no need to doubt the regional and social linguistic hierarchies implied.

6.4.3 Developing neutrality through erasure

After the Twe-spraack (1584) and its second edition (1614; Dibbets 1985: 4), the first fully-fledged grammars of Dutch are van Heule (1625) and van Heule (1633).

References to the wider continental West Germanic context become scarce from the seventeenth century onwards (see Section 6.4.5). Attention is paid to forms that are considered to be typical of particular regions within the present-day Dutch language area. Van Heule often discusses variants from different regions (van der Wal & van Bree 2008: 210–216), praising, for example, Brabantic for its diminutive formation and Frisian for specific phonological characteristics (1633: 161–162). At the same time, he aims to describe, and prescribe, a common language, a variety that can be used throughout the language area and that is superior to other varieties, founded on the literary language of the best poets (Dibbets 2003c). Here, van Heule aligns himself with the well-known pan-European debates on good and bad lan-guage that surfaced from the Early Modern period onwards (cf. e.g. Ayres-Bennett

& Seijido 2013). A similar line of reasoning can be found in Leupenius’s 1653 grammar Aanmerkingen op de Neederduitsche taale (‘Remarks on the Dutch lan-guage’). He also favours usage as a guide for a grammatical description, which he elaborates as follows:

De gewoonte sall ons de wett stellen; niet een opgenomene gewoonte van desen of geenen in het bysonder, niet van eene Stad, of Landschapp, daar ieder iet besonders heeft, dat groote verscheidentheid veroorsaakt: maar die door den gemeenen drukk en dagelykschen ommegang opgenoomen en gebillykt is.

(Leupenius 1653: A2^v–A3^r) Custom will be our law; not an acquired custom of this or that particular person, not of a specific city or region, where each has something special, which causes great diversity; but the custom that is used and approved of by common print and in daily contact.

Van Heule (1625: 116) had also claimed that there was a common language in writing as opposed to regional diversity in speech. Leupenius extends the argu-ment to the spoken language. Disregarding the reliability of such claims about the presumed uniformity of these varieties, it should be noted that Leupenius aims to codify a common variety that is idiolectally and regionally unmarked, i.e. he aims at a neutral variety. This common variety is added to the existing repertoire of individual, urban and rural forms. He also incorporates a hierarchy in his view of sociolinguistic space, not explicitly, but it is of course implied by the fact that this specific variety is worth the effort of a grammatical description.

The neutrality argued for by Leupenius feeds on the supralocalisation of spe-cific variants. Forms that are found in print books and that are subsequently spread over the language area are preferred, whereas localisable forms are rejected. By this time, neutrality does not consist of a combination of forms from various regions, but is rather the result of variant reduction, with the selection of a form being boosted by it being used in a wider region. In other words, neutrality as patchwork gives way to neutrality through erasure. It was in this period that the official Bible translation, ordered by the States General, came out (1637). For almost twenty years, translators and proofreaders originating from almost all regions in the Low Countries worked on the translation (van der Sijs 2004: 133–143). The end result was a Dutch text that lacked easily recognisable regional forms, which were care-fully avoided by the team of translators and proofreaders (van der Sijs 2004: 141).

Here, too, neutrality through erasure replaced the sixteenth-century practice of neutrality as patchwork.

At the end of the seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth century, two metalinguistic texts were published in which reference was made to the ancient Greek situation of several dialects and one koine, as de Heuiter (1581) had done (Section 6.4.1). Whereas de Heuiter had claimed that his spelling system was the result of patchwork, the texts from around 1700, while acknowledging the exist-ence of many regional varieties, give preferexist-ence to one of these varieties, which is elevated to the level of commonality through a hierarchising discursive move that Joseph (1987: 2) aptly called synecdochic. Winschooten (1683) argues that various

dialecti can be distinguished in Dutch, as in Greek. This should not be done at the most local level, however, as this would lead to as many dialecti as there are

“peoples, districts, even cities” (1683: 74; my translation). Instead, Winschooten distinguishes four regional writing traditions: the southern (including Flemish), western (including Hollandic), eastern (including Gueldrish) and northern (in-cluding Frisian) traditions. In addition, there is the algemeene spelling ‘common spelling’. In practice, Winschooten appears to equate the Hollandic dialectus with the common language (Vosters & Rutten 2013: 6–7).

Similarly, Verwer (1707: *3^r) argues for a lingua communis, a common language that exists in addition to the various dialects. Interestingly, Verwer takes great pains to distinguish between the common language and the dialectus poëtica ‘literary dia-lect’ (1707: *3^r), which seems to be at odds with the good usage tradition referred to above. He argues that the common language can be found in the 1637 Bible trans-lation and in certain Middle Dutch sources, not in contemporary literary sources (van de Bilt 2009: 58–59, 63 and see below, Section 6.4.4). He also states that the common language is essentially Holland based (Verwer 1707: 5). Moreover, Verwer explicitly says that he focuses on the written language, not on the spoken language, where variation is widespread, in particular in pronunciation (Verwer 1707: *3^v). As before, there is no need to doubt the high place occupied by the lingua communis in the hierarchy of varieties, and Verwer even argues that eventually, the common language could be described and explained in a Dutch-language grammar of Dutch, so that the illiterate (1707: *6^v) can benefit from it. First, the erudite need to decide on the grammatical description of the common language. As yet, the lingua com-munis is the supralocally applicable Holland-based variety of written Dutch that is added to the sociolinguistic repertoire (Daan 1989: 180).³

From the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, a general awareness of the variety of spoken and written Dutch of the time can be discerned. It is also clear that in the fullest awareness of the actual variety of Dutches, commentators tried to fix only one of these varieties, mostly a written variety based on writing practices prevailing in the larger Holland area. Often, this one variety is also hierarchically conceptualised as the best variety. Throughout the period, it is argued that the Dutch language is in need of polishing, a preoccupation that was intensified at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

3. Note that around the middle of the eighteenth century, the Greek scholar Tiberius Hemsterhuis claimed there was a supralocal form of spoken Dutch, different from regional varieties and used in particular among the higher social ranks (Hemsterhuis 2017: 103–105).

6.4.4 Polishing the mother tongue

A main argument put forward by writers of grammars and orthographies to justify their normalising work on Dutch concerns the state of the language. Its state would not conform to its high place in the hierarchy of languages and it therefore needs to be polished, i.e. normalised and regularised. The call for polishing thus depends on discourses of hierarchisation, especially on the external hierarchy according to which Germanic languages are ‘better’ than Romance languages (Section 6.4.2). To argue for polishing, cultivation, perfection and the like is to argue for action, and often follows from complaints about the bad state of the language. The Milrovian complaint tradition (Milroy & Milroy 2012) is the other side of what we could call the grammatical action tradition (Hundt 2000; Rutten 2006). It is easy to find parallels in neighbouring language areas, where grammarians and language com-mentators equally justify their activities with reference to a complaint, from Pudor’s (1672: x2^r) grievance about “ein grosser Mangel” in contemporary German to Swift’s well-known Proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English tongue (1712).

A plea for linguistic polish is very much part of Dutch eighteenth-century metalinguistic discourse, which brings to mind the rise of politeness as a tool for social distinction in contemporary England and the concomitant socially stratified myth of polite language (Fitzmaurice 2010; Watts 2011: 183–208).

Nevalainen (2014: 106), discussing the interplay of language norms and use in seventeenth-century English, reminds us that we need to take into account the

Nevalainen (2014: 106), discussing the interplay of language norms and use in seventeenth-century English, reminds us that we need to take into account the