The three stages of normative grammar

In the first half of the eighteenth century, language planning activities were quite restricted and focused regarding their target audience and target registers or varie-ties. Towards the end of the century, metalinguistic discourse was reconceptualised

in nationalist terms, resulting in the official language policy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Noordegraaf (2004a) and van de Bilt (2009: 60–68) call one of the defining characteristics of eighteenth-century metalinguistic discourse its so-cial orientation. Many early-eighteenth-century works, Noordegraaf (2004a: 218) says, have “a social view of language”, while “the linguists of the next generation took a step further. To them, the mother tongue also became a means to establish a community, a nation, and to improve civil society. Language is therefore seen as a socialising force”. This change of orientation from restricted to social, and then to socialising is elaborated upon in Rutten (2009), where three stages are distinguished in the development of eighteenth-century metalinguistic discourse, viz. elitist, ‘civil’

and national. With respect to target audiences and target registers, the discursive change can also be conceptualised as running from exclusive to inclusive. This does not mean that grammarians increasingly adopt an inclusive approach to the input register, incorporating, for example, regional variants (see also Chapter 7). On the contrary, the descriptive apparatus as well as the prescriptions and proscriptions remained remarkably stable from the early eighteenth century to the early nine-teenth century.

The restricted approach characterising the first decades of the eighteenth cen-tury means that grammar-writing can be thought of as an elitist activity, often conducted by upper and upper-middle class men such as poets and ministers, and also aimed at their immediate peers (Rutten 2006, 2007). There were strong social, situational and register conditions on the use of Dutch in accordance with the supposed rules of grammar. Knowledge of the body of rules laid down in norma-tive grammar was deemed necessary particularly for literary authors and orators, but irrelevant for other purposes. The period is also characterised by its so-called Vondelianism, i.e. by a preference for written language norms founded on the lan-guage of literary authors, most prominently of the poet Vondel (Rutten 2006). The period brought forth important normative grammars such as Arnold Moonen’s Nederduitsche spraekkunst (‘Dutch grammar’, 1706; Schaars 1988) and Willem Séwel’s Nederduytsche spraakkonst (‘Dutch grammar’, 1708, 21712). Another im-portant work is Huydecoper’s Proeve van taal- en dichtkunde (‘Essay on the study of language and poetry’, 1730), an extensive collection of linguistic and poetical remarks to one of the works of Vondel (de Bonth 1998).

One particular and somewhat narrow interpretation by the poet and Latin school teacher David van Hoogstraten (Rutten 2006), who mainly wrote about the gender of nouns and nominal inflection, even defines the intended readership as especially male juveniles who are to become the next great poets. In such cases, grammar serves literature. Here, grammar has a propaedeutical function in the education of a cultural elite. In this period, grammar also functions as a mark

of intellectualism, and of scholarship. Studying the grammar of Dutch is hardly possible without knowledge of Latin and/or Greek, and it would be only slightly exaggerated to call Moonen’s (1706) grammar of Dutch a Latin grammar in which the object language has been substituted by Dutch. Linguistics, in other words, was primarily a scholarly occupation, carried out by well-educated and multilingual members of the international Republic of Letters (Rutten 2007). The few linguistic works that do not focus on literary authors and orators are written in Latin such as Adriaen Verwer’s Linguae belgicae idea grammatica, poetica, rhetorica (1707;

van de Bilt 2009) or otherwise clearly aimed at a learned public, such as ten Kate’s complicated and voluminous Aenleiding (‘Introduction’, 1723).

Around the middle of the century, grammarians argue that explicit knowledge of the grammar of the supralocal variety should be extended to other parts of soci-ety, and that ideally, all members of the population should be aware of these rules, abandoning the fairly restricted target audience and target varieties of the earlier decades. From c. 1740 to 1770, the intended readership of normative grammar was enlarged by incorporating men as well as women, and the youth of the upper as well as the middle ranks. Knowledge of the grammar of Dutch came to serve as a mark of civilised burghers ‘citizens’ (Crowley 1996: 73). In this period of so-called

‘civil’ grammar, linguistic publications from the elitist period are rephrased in a less classical vocabulary, and educational strategies are employed to render grammatical knowledge more comprehensible to larger parts of the population.

The period of national grammar runs from about 1770 into the nineteenth cen-tury and beyond, and is characterised by a further extension of the intended reader-ship. Normative grammar now becomes a matter of national concern (Noordegraaf 2004a). ‘Civilised’, ‘educated’ language is no longer only a mark of respectable cit-izens. It should be the hallmark of society as a whole and therefore be taught in schools. The Nederduitsche Spraekkunst, voor de Jeugdt ‘Dutch grammar, for the young’ (1769) by Kornelis van der Palm marks the transition from ‘civil’ to national grammar. It presents received knowledge of the previous periods in a simplified and refined manner. It is explicitly meant for use in schools. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the development from elitist to national grammar results in the official language policy, specifically in the national orthography (Siegenbeek 1804a) and grammar (Weiland 1805a), imposed by the government and to be used by the administration and in the educational system. This beginning of the offi-cial codification of Dutch was initiated by the minister of national education (see Chapter 1), i.e. Johan Hendrik van der Palm, Kornelis’s son.