Belgian Dutch versus Netherlandic Dutch - Semantic Scholar

Belgian Dutch versus Netherlandic Dutch: New patterns of divergence? On pronouns of address and diminutives REINHILD VANDEKERCKHOVE

Abstract The linguistic climate in northern Belgium (Flanders) has been changing in recent years. A new corpus of spoken Dutch meets the need for data reflecting actual and present-day language use in this part of the Dutch language area. The ‘Spoken Dutch Corpus’ allows us to uncover and analyse the present state of colloquial Belgian Dutch and the changes which mark this condition. This paper discusses the realization of two morphosyntactic variables, the variants of which are markers of Belgian Dutch versus Netherlandic Dutch. In spite of more than half a century of official language policy promoting convergence with northern Netherlandic Dutch, the results reveal a growing divergence from the northern norm: the younger generations show a greater preference for the endogenous, Brabantic, variants than the older generations. The northern Dutch variants have not been integrated in colloquial Belgian Dutch. Apparently they are still considered to be ‘Hollandic import’.1 1. Introduction Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French and German. The southern, Walloon, provinces of Belgium are French-speaking, except for a small German-speaking area alongside the German border. The native speakers of German (ca. 71,000) constitute a small minority in Belgium. In the northern, Flemish, provinces, Dutch is the official language. Brussels capital region is officially bilingual. The Dutch-speaking community in Belgium outnumbers the French-speaking community by ca. 6 million to ca. 4 million native speakers. Dutch-speaking Belgium constitutes one contiguous area with the Netherlands (20 million inhabitants) which is situated north of the Belgian Dutch area and where Dutch is the official language as well. Although northern Belgium (Flanders) and the Netherlands share the same Multilingua 24 (2005), 379⫺397

01678507/2005/024⫺0379 쑕 Walter de Gruyter

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Reinhild Vandekerckhove

language, there are quite a number of distinctive elements in both grammar and lexis which explain why terms such as ‘Belgian Dutch’ and ‘Netherlandic Dutch’ function as key notions in much of the literature on the Dutch language situation. Yet, labelling Dutch as a pluricentric language with two interacting centres (cf. Clyne 1992) was considered to be problematic until recently,2 because the powerful base has long been situated in the Netherlands: the national variety of the Netherlands functions as the official model for Standard Dutch in Belgium. In other words, the ‘codification has not been formulated in Belgium but in the neighbouring Netherlands’ (Willemyns and Bister 1989: 543). The explanation has to be found in the (previous) history of the standardization process in Flanders: until 1930 Dutch hardly functioned as a national, cultivated language in Flanders. French was used by the upper classes. It dominated education, administration, politics and public life in general, although the vast majority of the population spoke Dutch, or, rather, regional varieties of Dutch. For a long time hardly any supraregional variety of Dutch was used in Flanders, because French was omnipresent in those domains in which a supraregional variety was needed. In other words, the language situation in Flanders was strictly diglossic, with French as the high variety and Dutch as the low variety. This situation gradually changed at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, culminating in the language laws of the 1930s. Since 1932, Dutch has been the only official language in Flanders. At that time, Flanders was in need of a standard language. The debate between the ‘particularistic movement’, which wanted to give Flanders a standard language of its own, and the ‘integrationist movement’, which wanted the Dutch language area to have one and the same standard language, was won by the latter group. This implied that Flanders decided to adopt the Dutch standard language of the Netherlands. But it took many decades before one could speak of a more or less generalized command, let alone use, of the standard language in Flanders (cf. Goossens 1975). In the past few decades, quite a lot of research has been inspired by the question of whether Belgian Dutch is converging with northern, Netherlandic Dutch or whether diverging tendencies are prevalent. It has become clear that there is no unambiguous answer to this question: divergence on the phonological level appears to be accompanied by convergence on the lexical level (cf., e. g., Van de Velde 1996 and Grondelaers et al. 2001). In this paper I would like to to ‘revisit’ the topic, assuming that there are at least three pertinent reasons for doing so. First of all, the linguistic climate in northern Belgium, or Flanders, has changed so drastically in recent years that an update of the research on the topic is needed. Secondly, research on the relation between Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch has mainly dealt with lexical or phono-

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logical variables. By focusing on some morpho-syntactic variables we might be able to add a new dimension to the discussion. Thirdly, the availability of a new and large corpus of spoken Dutch (see below), offers new possibilities for the study of spoken Dutch in all its diversity. A highly significant variable which deserves more attention than it has received until now, is the realization of the pronoun for the 2nd person singular in Belgian Dutch, more particularly in spoken Belgian Dutch. Vermaas (2002) offers an extensive and fascinating analysis of the evolution of the pronouns of address in (Netherlandic) Dutch between the 13th and 20th century, but hardly deals with present-day Belgian Dutch. This paper will mainly focus on pronouns of address in spoken Belgian Dutch, but the changing patterns in the realization of the pronominal variable will also be compared to the realization of another variable which can also be considered to be symptomatic of the present condition of spoken Dutch in Belgium: the realization of the diminutive suffix. 2. The Spoken Dutch Corpus Our data were extracted from the sixth release of the ‘Spoken Dutch Corpus’ (SDC). The SDC is a large digital database of contemporary Standard Dutch as spoken by adults in the Netherlands and Flanders at the beginning of the 21st century.3 The corpus contains several text types. For the present study only so-called spontaneous face-to-face conversations were used, more particularly the available orthographic transcriptions of those conversations which were conducted by two or three informants. The corpus aims at a well-balanced geographical representation of the different dialect groups through its choice of informants. For

Map. Dutch-speaking northern Belgium (⫽ Flanders) with its five provinces.

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Table 1. 쎲Please give a heading to this table here!!쎲

West-Flanders East-Flanders Brabant Limburg Total

younger older younger older younger older younger older

Average age Number of in 2003 informants

Number of tokens pronoun

Number of tokens diminutive

27 59 29 59 26 62 25 56

1,802 631 881 242 1,598 599 1,215 1,254

220 126 189 30 332 162 118 144

12 5 8 4 15 6 9 12 71

8,222

1,216

northern Belgium, the four main dialect regions are represented, i. e. West-Flanders (capital: Bruges), East-Flanders (capital: Ghent), Limburg (capital: Hasselt) and finally the Brabantic area, which comprises the provinces of Flemish-Brabant (capital: Leuven) and Antwerp (capital: Antwerp). We analysed data from 71 informants, 35 men and 36 women, nearly all of them highly educated.4 Two age groups were differentiated: the informants in the youngest group were born between 1967 and 1982. The informants in the older generation were born between 1938 and 1956.5 48 hours of speech were extracted. They provided 8,222 tokens of the 2nd person singular pronoun (subject, object and possessive). For the diminutive variable, we have far fewer tokens that are ‘relevant’ (cf. below). Table 1 shows the relative representation of the different age groups and geographical groups and the number of tokens available for each cell. The unequal distribution of the informants is due to the fact that the processing of the data for the corpus had not been finished when this research was carried out, which implies that there are still gaps in the pool of informants. For three of the four regions, the older group is considerably smaller than the younger group. Nearly all of the informants conversed with a friend or an acquaintance for three hours, though not continuously, at home, without a researcher being present. Consequently, the situation can be characterized as being informal, in spite of the presence of a small digital recorder. The informants were free to choose the topic of their conversation. The fact that all of the informants were asked to speak Standard Dutch to each other is, however, highly relevant for the interpretation of the results.


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3. The singular pronouns of address 3.1 The pronominal paradigm for the 2nd person singular For the pronominal paradigm for the 2nd person singular, there was and is an essential difference between endogenous colloquial Belgian Dutch and (northern-based or Netherlandic-based) Standard Dutch. Apart from some formal differences, there is also a structural difference: unlike the Standard Dutch paradigm, the Belgian Dutch paradigm contains no contrast between polite and informal forms. It is neutral with respect to the power and solidarity semantic. Neither the presence or absence of hierarchical relations nor the presence or absence of solidarity has repercussions for the choice of the pronoun because there is no distinction between V-pronouns and T-pronouns (cf. Brown and Gilman 1964).6 Table 1 offers a survey of the pronouns in both varieties. In the cells containing two pronouns, the first one is the weak (unaccented) variant (e. g. je), while the second one is the strong (accented) variant (e. g. jij). The term ‘colloquial’ refers essentially to spoken Dutch as it is used in everyday conversation in Belgium, although an exception must be made for certain varieties of ‘netspeak’ (chat language, language in e-mails) which are often very informal and therefore often display the same characteristics as the ones ascribed to informal colloquial Belgian Dutch7. Some examples may illustrate the differences: (1)

‘You sleep a lot’ (a) Informal ⫹ formal (colloquial) Belgian Dutch: GE slaapt veel (b) Informal Standard Dutch: JE slaapt veel (c) Formal Standard Dutch: U slaapt veel

(2) ‘I saw you yesterday’ (a) Informal ⫹ formal (colloquial) Belgian Dutch: ik zag U gisteren (b) Informal Standard Dutch: ik zag JE gisteren (c) Formal Standard Dutch: ik zag U gisteren The differences illustrated in (1) are purely formal: the Belgian Dutch colloquial variant is ge instead of je. Example (2a) illustrates a functional difference: (2a) is perfectly acceptable in Standard Dutch, but it expresses politeness, distance, absence of solidarity (cf. 2c). In colloquial Belgian Dutch this utterance can be used to address a good friend or a family member (expressing solidarity). Just like possessive uw and subject ge, object u is neutral with respect to formality, familiarity and solidarity in colloquial Belgian Dutch.8 Since the official standard language in Dutch-speaking Belgium corresponds to the standard language spoken in the Netherlands, the pro-

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Table 2. 쎲Please give a heading to this table here!!쎲 Standard Dutch INFORMAL Standard Dutch FORMAL/POLITE (Colloquial) Belgian Dutch INFORMAL ⫹ FORMAL

Subject

Object

Possessive

je / jij

je / jou

je / jouw

U

u

uw

ge / gij

U

uw

nominal paradigm for the 2nd person singular used, for example, in written language, in education and in the media is the northern-based Standard Dutch paradigm. However, there seems to be a clash between these domains and registers and everyday spoken language in informal domains. Research showed that the Standard Dutch polite form u (subject) was integrated much earlier and more easily in the speech of Flemings intending to speak Standard Dutch than its informal counterpart je and its strong variants.9 A quarter of a century ago, Deprez and Geerts (1977: 371) stated: ‘the problem is that je presupposes familiarity and solidarity, whereas for most Flemings only ge has those connotations’.10 Yet, it could be assumed that it would not take long before the northern pronoun je would be integrated into the colloquial speech of Flemings. The sixties and the seventies of the previous century were marked by intensive campaigns both in education and in the media, the aim of which was to make Flemings familiar with the northern Dutch standard language. More particularly, the pronoun je was systematically propagated in secondary schools from 1960 onwards (Deprez and Geerts 1977: 159). As a consequence, Flemings gradually became familiar with this pronoun. It was to be expected that this growing familiarity would be reflected in an increasing use of it. The SDC allows us to investigate whether this expectation has come true. The results presented in 3.2 might answer the question as to what extent the northern pronouns je, jij and jou(w) have been integrated in informal spoken Belgian Dutch at the beginning of the 21st century. By analysing spontaneous speech,11 we intend to add a new dimension to the research on the development of supraregional Dutch in northern Belgium. 3.2 Result Figure 1 presents the relative frequency scores or the percentages for the three subject variants: Belgian Dutch ge/gij, Standard Dutch je/jij,


385

100 80 60 ge / gij

40

je / jij 20

u Limburg

Brabant

East-Fl.

West-Fl.

0

Figure 1. Northern Dutch je versus Belgian Dutch ge in subject funtion.

Standard Dutch (but formal and polite) u.12 Since there is considerable ⫺ and apparently significant13 ⫺ regional variation, the distinction according to the region of origin has been preserved in this survey. The use of the je-pronoun appears to decrease from west to east, and, in a complementary way, the use of the endogenous ge-pronoun increases from west to east. The pronoun u hardly plays a role in subject function, which is not surprising in view of the informality of the speech situation. West-Flanders clearly stands apart: je has a frequency score of nearly 80 percent for this region, whereas in the other regions the ge-pronoun is by far the dominant pronoun. If we distinguish the frequency scores for the use of the Standard Dutch pronoun je by age group, the same regular pattern emerges for the younger group. For the older group, however, the overall picture is very irregular: The age group differences are significant for all regions.14 The data for the older East-Flemish group clearly stand out, due to the extremely low frequency score for the je-pronoun, but they should be dealt with carefully in view of the limited number of tokens available for this group (cf. Table 1). Nevertheless, in one respect both the data for East-Flanders and the data for West-Flanders come up to the expectations: the younger generation has higher frequency scores for the Standard Dutch je-pronoun than the older one. For the Brabantic and Limburg area, however, we get the reverse pattern: the je-pronoun is less well represented in the speech of the younger informants than it is in the speech of the older informants. Yet it can be assumed that the younger generation is much more familiar with the je-paradigm than the older one. The je-pronouns have been propagated systematically in education only since the 1960s,

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Reinhild Vandekerckhove 80 70 60 50 40 30

older

20

younger

Limburg

Brabant

East-Fl.

0

West-Fl.

10

Figure 2. The use of the Standard Dutch pronoun je in subject function by the ‘younger’ and ‘older’ generation.

which implies that some of the informants of the older generation may have learnt the je-paradigm at school, but for many of them the presence of the je-pronoun in their linguistic education must have been very premature or just non-existent. It is beyond doubt, however, that all of the younger informants learnt how to use the je-paradigm at school. But this greater knowledge and command of the je-paradigm do not correspond to a more intensive use of it by the Brabantic and Limburg informants: in informal contexts the interlocutor is in a vast majority of cases addressed with ge or gij, in spite of the fact that Standard Dutch was the variety to be used. In some respects these data strikingly mirror the results of Kremer (2000). Kremer questioned Flemish informants about their use of the pronoun ge versus je (and the polite form u) in several domains or contexts. The research design of Kremer differs from the approach presented here, because it deals with reported speech and does not focus on (intended) standard language. The question in Kremer (2000) is not ‘Which variants do you use when speaking Standard Dutch?’, but ‘Which variants do you use in contexts x and y?’ Most of the SDCinformants converse with a friend or a colleague from the same age group. One of Kremer’s questions (2000) relates to language use with peers: 61 percent and 64 percent of the lower and middle class informants respectively of the youngest age group questioned in 1985, all of them living in the provinces of East-Flanders or Antwerp, report using ge when addressing peers. A comparable enquiry in 1995 offers no data for language use with peers, but it does contain data on language use in the intimate family circle, more particularly with regard to conversation


387

100 80 60

0

Limburg

je/jou Brabant

20 East-Fl.

u

West-Fl.

40

Figure 3. The use of Standard Dutch je/jou versus Beligian Dutch u in object function.

100 80 60

Limburg

0

Brabant

je/jouw East-Fl.

uw

20 West-Fl.

40

Figure 4. The use of Standard Dutch je/jouw versus Beligian Dutch uw in possessive function.

with parents: 82 percent of the younger informants questioned in 1995 report that they use ge when addressing their parents (Kremer 2000: 18, 21). 64.96 percent of the East-Flemish and 78.43 percent of the Brabant CSD-informants effectively use ge when addressing someone from the peer group, even when required to speak Standard Dutch. Although we should be careful when comparing both studies, the results suggest that de CSD-informants hardly adapt their ‘normal’ speech habits to the recording situation and the specific task they were given: to speak Standard Dutch. This might imply that the barrier to using the pronoun je is still insurmountable for many informants, or, in other words, that je (jij) is still considered to be too much of an exogeneous form to be used with peers. The representation of the je-pronoun in the CSD is even weaker in object and possessive function.15 The data in Figures 3 and 4 merely

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Table 3. 쎲Please give a heading to this table here!!쎲 Standard Dutch JE-paradigm Belgian Dutch GE-paradigm

Subject

Object

Possessive

35.72 % 63.48 %16

20.48 % 79.5 %

16.51 % 83.48 %

represent the scores for the younger generation, as in some cases there were not enough tokens for the older generation. East-Flanders, Brabant and Limburg now clearly constitute a fairly homogeneous region: object u and possessive uw, both of them being the endogenous Belgian Dutch variants representing the ge-paradigm, get frequency scores of 80 percent and more in those regions. As was pointed out before, object u and possessive uw are part of the Standard Dutch paradigm as well; however, within the Standard Dutch paradigm they function as polite forms. Here, they function as informal pronouns expressing familiarity, which is excluded in Standard Dutch. In West-Flanders, the je-forms are slightly in the majority in object function, but in possessive function they give way to the ge-paradigm, represented by possessive uw. The unequal functional distribution of the je-pronoun is illustrated in Table 3, which comprises the results for all of the informants and regions. The je-pronoun is better represented in subject function than in object and possessive function. This implies that at least some informants switch from the je-paradigm to the ge-paradigm or vice versa to some extent, depending on the function of the pronoun. More particularly: some informants use Standard Dutch je in subject function but endogenous u and uw in object and possessive function. (3) Heb je al geoefend met uw fiets? ‘Have you exercised with your bicycle?’ Part of the explanation for this imbalance probably lies in the fact that the object and possessive form of the ge-paradigm, i. e. u and uw, are part of the northern-based Standard Dutch paradigm as well, though belonging to another register (cf. the supra register). This may explain their stronger ‘resistance’ to the Standard Dutch informal forms je and jou (w). They are probably not felt to be deviant from Standard Dutch to the same extent as the subject form ge (gij), which has no equivalent in Standard Dutch. The finding that the Standard Dutch je-pronoun is better represented in subject function than in object and possessive function corroborates


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to some extent the findings of Goossens (1990), which were based on analyses of written Dutch by Flemish university students in 1981 and 1989. Goossens observed a partial adoption of the northern-based Standard Dutch system by Flemish students: many of them appeared to switch consistently between the je-paradigm and the ge-paradigm, using pronouns from the first paradigm in subject function and pronouns from the latter in object and possessive function. Goossens (1990) interprets this phenomenon in terms of an intermediate phase and predicts a next phase constituting a generalized use of the Standard Dutch informal pronoun. Although no secondary research of this type has been done on written Belgian Dutch, it is beyond doubt that this has effectively happened: in written language the use of the Standard Dutch paradigm has been generalized.17 As can be deduced from the figures above, this generalized use of the je-paradigm certainly does not hold for the informal spoken speech of the younger informants. And what is more: although the results in Table 3 do mirror Goossens’ findings to some extent, the je-paradigm is so weakly represented even in subject position, that there is no ground for stating that the intermediate phase which was registered for written Belgian Dutch more than two decades ago, has been reached in informal spoken Belgian Dutch by now. Another striking finding concerning the distribution of the pronoun, lies in the fact that the pronoun je in subject position is much better represented in enclitic position than in proclitic position. This implies that example (4) is less likely to occur in the corpus than examples (5) or (6): (4) Je komt (‘You come’) (5) Kom je (‘Do you come?’) (6) Ik hoop dat je komt (‘I hope that you come’) This might be explained both in terms of the dialect geography of northern Belgium and in terms of the je-pronoun being less conspicuous in enclitic position. However, we will not enlarge on this aspect here (cf. Vandekerckhove 2004). The overall conclusion is that many decades after the pronoun je was imported into northern Belgium (Flanders) and was firmly rooted in official Standard Dutch as it is being used in Flanders, in written language, in education, in the media, it has acquired only a very modest position in the informal spoken supraregional Dutch of most Flemings. The data for Brabant and Limburg even suggest it is on its way down in this register.

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Looking for an explanation for this phenomenon, we have to turn to the changing or the changed linguistic climate in Flanders. While in the sixties and seventies of the previous century many efforts were made by public services, by the media, by teachers and by laymen to bring the Dutch standard language within the reach of every Fleming, we now observe a kind of change from below: Flemings increasingly use a supraregional language variety with strong Brabantic influence. It has often been called an ‘intermediate language variety’18 because, from a structural perspective, it is situated in between the standard language and the Brabantic dialects. This so-called intermediate variety increasingly seems to function as a kind of general Flemish colloquial variety. It has penetrated into domains in which the standard language previously was the unmarked medium. Symptomatic is, for example, its omnipresence in TV-programs focusing on entertainment nowadays. To this fact it owes its ⫺ somewhat ironic and hardly flattering ⫺ nickname ‘soap-Flemish’ (Geeraerts et al. 2000). The fact is, however, that Flanders increasingly seems to rely on a language centre of its own, viz. the Brabantic area, at the same time turning away from the northern norm. One of the indisputable exponents of this Flemish colloquial variety is the pronoun ge. It is an endogenous Brabantic pronoun, which is also present in the East-Flemish dialects and to a minor extent in the Limburg and West-Flemish dialects. The pronoun je however, is, to a smaller or greater degree,19 an endogenous pronoun in West-Flanders as well. This might explain the higher scores for the Standard Dutch pronoun in West-Flanders and consequently the outsider position of this province, to some extent. However, the peripheral position of the province, with East-Flanders functioning as a kind of buffer which separates WestFlanders from the Brabantic area, might be an explanatory factor as well. 4. Comparative material: The diminutive suffix The choices present in the second variable presented here can generally be interpreted along the same lines. For Flemish speakers of Dutch two diminutive suffixes are available: /j ⬵/ and /k ⬵/. Both of them have a number of allomorphs, depending on the phonetic context in which they are used: /j ⬵/: [J ⬵], [ ⬵ tj ⬵], [pj ⬵], [tj ⬵]: e. g. knoopje (‘small button’), mannetje (‘small man’), boompje (‘small tree’), boontje (‘small bean’) /k ⬵/: [k ⬵], [ ⬵ k ⬵], [sk ⬵]: e. g. knoopke (‘small button’), manneke (‘small man’), bankske (‘small bench’)


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Table 4. 쎲Please give a heading to this table here!!쎲 DIMINUTIVE suffixes Standard Dutch Colloquial Belgian Dutch

-je -ke: in most phonetic contexts -je: in a limited number of phonetic contexts

The -ke-suffix is a typical exponent of colloquial Belgian Dutch, the -jesuffix is the Standard Dutch realization. The -ke-suffix is strongly represented both in the dialects of Dutchspeaking Belgium and in supraregional colloquial Dutch in Belgium. However, its counterpart -je does not mark Netherlandic Dutch exclusively. In most dialects of Dutch-speaking Belgian both -je and -ke are present. The distribution of these morphemes and their allomorphs is determined by the phonetic context. Historically speaking, -je is the palatalized version of the original -ke-suffix. The presence of the palatalized suffixes increases from east to west. In the western part of West-Flanders, the -je-suffix is used in all phonetic contexts. The other extreme can be found in the southern part of the Brabantic area, where the -kesuffix is used in all phonetic contexts.20 So, just like the pronoun ge, the suffix -ke is a typical Brabantic realization, although in large parts of the Brabantic area, the -je-suffix is present as well, though only in a very limited number of phonetic contexts, e. g. words ending in /n/ preceded by a long vowel, a diphthong or a schwa nearly everywhere demand the diminutive suffix -je: tuin-tje (‘small garden’), teen-tje (‘small toe’). The same is true for words ending in /t/ preceded by a long vowel or a consonant, e. g. straat-je (‘small street’), krant-je (‘small newspaper’). In all other contexts the Brabantic dialects demand -ke. This also holds for the supraregional colloquial language which is used in the Brabantic area and beyond the borders of that area. In fact, this wide distribution of the suffix -ke and limited distribution of the suffix -je marks the so-called ‘intermediate variety’ which is increasingly used as a kind of general Belgian Dutch (Flemish) colloquial variety (cf. the supra register). At the same time, it implies another morphological distinction between the Belgian Dutch colloquial variety and Standard Dutch. The latter is marked by an exclusive use of the -je-suffix in all phonetic contexts. Consequently, a pertinent question is which diminutive suffixes are used by Flemings nowadays, and more particularly by Flemings who intend to speak a supraregional variety, and, in the case of the informants for the Spoken Dutch Corpus, who were required to speak Standard Dutch. In view of the distribution of the -je- and -ke-suffix in northern Belgium, two choices have to be made when analysing the Spoken Dutch Corpus:

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⫺ Either all of the diminutives can be included in the analysis or a selection can be made so that only the diminutives in which -ke or -je really function as variants in larger parts of northern Belgium are included. The latter option seems preferable: in some phonetic contexts (cf. the supra register) -je is the categorical form for most regions of northern Belgium, which implies that -ke simply is not an option in those cases. Consequently, these phonetic contexts were systematically eliminated from the SDC-material. They are not represented in Figure 5 (cf. the infra register). ⫺ Choosing this option implies another decision: which region functions as the reference point? The number of phonetic contexts in which -je is used categorically increases from east to west. If we selected the small Brabantic area, the dialects of which only have the -ke-suffix, then no tokens would have to be eliminated at all: in all cases the speaker can choose the -ke-realization present in his dialect or the Standard Dutch -je-realization. However, the analyses of the SDC not only make clear that -ke is omnipresent in the corpus but also, more importantly, that it is just never used at all in some phonetic contexts, more particularly those contexts in which -je is categorical in most of the Brabantic area. Eliminating these contexts results in a more accurate view of the choices made by the informants. It could be argued that this ‘Brabantic’ distribution is not applicable to the speech of informants of other regions, e. g. the speech of WestFlemish informants. This is certainly true for the dialect use of those informants, but our focus is not on dialect use, but on supraregional language use. West-Flemings are confronted daily with the Brabantic ‘intermediate variety’ on radio and, especially, television. So, although their dialect may persist to a major or minor extent, their supraregional speech certainly should also be interpreted in terms of a choice between either the use of Standard Dutch variants (which may or may not correspond to the variants they use in their native dialect) or the adoption of Brabantic elements (which also may or may not correspond to the endogenous dialect variants).21 Figure 5 presents the relative frequency of the Standard Dutch diminutive suffix. Because of the extremely limited number of tokens for the older East-Flemish generation, it presents no results for this group.22 Generally speaking, the Standard Dutch diminutive suffix appears to be better integrated in colloquial Belgian Dutch than the Standard Dutch pronoun je, which may be due to the fact that the former is not entirely absent in most Belgian Dutch dialects, whereas the latter for most regions is. In all other respects, the results appear to be highly comparable to those for the 2nd person pronoun: the Standard Dutch


Older

Limburg

Brabant

East-Fl.

Younger West-Fl.

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

393

Figure 5. The use of Standard Dutch diminutive suffix -je by the ‘younger’ and ‘older’ generation.

realization is much better represented in West-Flanders than in the eastern provinces. For the younger informants of the Brabant area the -kerealization is dominant: it has a frequency score of 60.84 percent, whereas its Standard Dutch counterpart only stands for 39.15 percent of the tokens. The differences between younger and older perfectly parallel those in Figure 2 as well23: in West-Flanders the use of the Standard Dutch realization appears to be still growing, whereas in the Brabant and the Limburg area, the use of the diminutive suffix -je decreases from older to younger. This is a remarkable trend, which once again runs counter to expectations as the younger generation certainly can be assumed to be more familiar with the Standard Dutch diminutive system than the older one. 4. Conclusion The Standard Dutch (or Netherlandic Dutch) informal pronouns of the 2nd person singular je, jij and jou(w) are still hardly integrated in the supraregional colloquial language of most Flemings. There are considerable regional differences but generally speaking, the Flemish ge-paradigm still dominates Belgian Dutch colloquial speech. This holds all the more for the region which has increasingly determined the development of (informal) spoken Dutch in Flanders in recent years, i. e. the Brabantic area, which comprises the provinces of Brabant and Antwerp. Limburg and to a minor extent East-Flanders adhere to the Brabantic area. West-Flanders does not, which ⫺ quite ironically ⫺ implies that for the variables presented here, the supraregional colloquial language of the region which is known to have the highest dialect vitality in Dutch speaking Belgium,24 approaches the standard language most closely. The

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findings for the realization of the diminutive suffix are highly comparable, but both the linguistic and the geographic distribution of the Standard Dutch variants and the Belgian Dutch equivalents are more complex for the diminutive variable than for the pronominal one. Generally speaking the Standard Dutch diminutive suffix appears to be better integrated in colloquial Belgian Dutch than the Standard Dutch pronoun je, which is linked to its distribution in northern Belgian dialects. However, one finding which is highly symptomatic of the present-day condition of Dutch in Flanders is clearly corroborated for both variables: precisely in the region which increasingly appears to set the linguistic example for Flanders, the younger generation shows a significantly higher preference for the endogenous Belgian Dutch and more particularly Brabantic variants than the older one. This is even more striking in view of the fact that, first of all, all of these younger informants were required to speak Standard Dutch and that, secondly, all of them have a high level of education. The latter factor implies that their language choices cannot be ascribed to a limited command of the Standard Dutch paradigm. The question is whether these choices reveal a growing Flemish self-confidence or a growing anti-Hollandic attitude. Both factors might hold and reinforce each other, but several Dutch linguists have remarked upon the latter tendency in the past decade.25 The SDC has allowed us to corroborate this tendency with present-day spontaneous language data. They reveal that the pronoun je and its strong variants jij, jou and jouw have still not been assimilated to the extent that they are treated as endogenous forms by speakers of Belgian Dutch. On the contrary, they are still considered to be Netherlandic (Hollandic) import.26 Although this probably is not applicable to the Standard Dutch diminutive suffixes to the same extent, we also observe an increase of Brabantic variants for this variable. More than half a century of official language policy promoting the use of the northernbased (Netherlandic) standard language could not prevent or suppress this evolution, and appears to be increasingly unsuccessful in doing so. Consequently, the attitudinal component will have to be a major point of interest in future research on language use in northern Belgium in order to reveal the ultimate causes for Belgian colloquial Dutch diverging from Standard Dutch instead of converging with standard (Netherlandic) Dutch, and, more particularly, in order to explain why, through an ‘informal standardization process’, Dutch is increasingly becoming an pluricentric language with two centres of standardization. University of Antwerp


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Notes 1. I want to thank both the anonymous reviewer and Marjan De Smet for their useful comments on the first version of this article. 2. Cf. Willemyns and Bister (1989), Geerts (1992). 3. Information on the Spoken Dutch Corpus can be found on: http://lands.let.kun.nl/cgn/home.htm. I want to thank Steven Gillis, Evie Cousse´ and Griet Depoorter (University of Antwerp, Department of linguistics) for supplying the material and the software for the exploitation of the corpus (COREX) and Daan Broeder (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) for offering practical solutions for the application of COREX. 4. 67 of the 71 informants have a high level of education, 4 informants have a middle-high level of education. The latter group contains two informants from the young Brabant generation and two informants from the older Brabant generation. None of the informants has a low level of education. 5. The youngest group corresponds to ‘age 1’ and ‘age 2’ of the Spoken Dutch Corpus (cf. COREX), the older group corresponds to ‘age 4’ and ‘age 5’. 6. V-pronouns are used, for example, when there is no ‘solidarity’ between the interlocutors, or for addressing someone who is considered to be superior, T-pronouns are used, for example, for expressing ‘solidarity’ or for addressing someone who is considered to be inferior. Brown and Gilman (1964) observe a shift from power to solidarity as the governing semantic principle. 7. Cf. Reinhild Vandekerckhove and Annelies Van Rooy (in press). 8. The pronouns ge/gij are not present in present-day Netherlandic Dutch, but it should be mentioned that the pronoun gij can be found in Netherlandic Dutch in archaic texts and especially in very solemn contexts, e. g. in prayer. 9. Peeters and Vercoullie (1930: 135), Deprez and Geerts (1977: 129), Kremer (2000) 10. Original Dutch version: ‘Het probleem is … dat JE bekendheid, vertrouwelijkheid, solidariteit veronderstelt, terwijl voor heel wat Vlamingen (gesprekspartners) enkel GE deze betekenissen heeft’ (Deprez and Geerts 1977: 371). 11. Goossens (1990) analysed the realization of the pronoun in written texts. Kremer (2000) deals with reported speech: East-Flemish and Antwerp informants are questioned about their use of je versus ge. For the findings of both studies: cf. below. 12. For the absolute number of tokens, see table 2. 13. Chi-square: df ⫽ 6, χ2 ⫽ 2480.647, p ⱕ 0.001. 14. Chi-square per region: West-Flanders: df ⫽ 1, χ2 ⫽ 20.500, p ⱕ 0.001, EastFlanders: df ⫽ 1, χ2 ⫽ 121.732, p ⱕ 0.001, Brabant: df ⫽ 1, χ2 ⫽ 105.784, p ⱕ 0.001, Limburg: df ⫽ 1, χ2 ⫽ 17.381, p ⱕ 0.001. 15. Kremer (2000) contains no data for object and possessive function. 16. The sum of this percentage and the one mentioned above is not 100 percent, because one variant has not been included in the table: in 0.79 percent of the cases, the informants neither use je nor ge in subject function, but the polite standard Dutch variant u. 17. An exception must be made for ‘netspeak’: in chatrooms Flemish adolescents predominantly use the ge-paradigm (Vandekerckhove and Van Rooy 2004). This is related to one of the major characteristics of chatlanguage: its intermediate position between written language and spoken language (cf. Crystal 2001) 18. ‘Tussentaal’ is the Dutch term (cf. Taeldeman 1992). 19. The use of the je-pronoun in West-Flanders increases from the south-east to the north-west: in the south-east it is only used in enclitic position following a vowel, in the north-west it is used in both proclitic and enclitic position and in all phonetic contexts (cf. Devos 1986)

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20. The area includes large parts of Flemish-Brabant and the southern edge of the province of Antwerp. The city of Leuven constitutes the centre of this exclusive -ke-area. The city of Brussels and most of its suburbs have the ‘mixed system’ demanding either -ke or -je depending on the phonetic context. (cf. Pe´e 1936/1938; De Vriendt 2000) 21. In the eastern West-Flemish dialects both the -ke-suffix and the -je-suffix are represented. 22. Table 1: for the older East-Flemish group the corpus contains only 30 tokens with variable use of -je and -ke, 24 of which were produced by one and the same informant, who consistently uses the Brabantic variant -ke. 23. The age group differences are significant: West-Flanders: df ⫽ 1, Chi-square ⫽ 23.324, p ⱕ 0.001, Brabant: df ⫽ 1, Chi-square ⫽ 24.772, p ⱕ 0.001, Limburg: df ⫽ 1, Chi-square: Chi-square ⫽ 12.581, p ⱕ 0.001. 24. Cf. e. g. Vandekerckhove (1998, 2000). 25. Taeldeman (1992: 13): ‘een anti-Hollandse reflex die tegelijkertijd gevolg en verdere oorzaak van culturele divergentie is’ (an anti-Hollandic reflex which is both the consequence and cause of cultural divergence), De Caluwe Devos (1998: 31): ’Hollandofobie’ (Hollando-fobia), Goossens (2000:6): ‘Een belangrijk element van de inkapseling vormen de verspreide anti-Hollandse sentimenten in Vlaanderen.’ (‘An important element of the encapsulation is the well-spread anti-Hollandic sentiment in Flanders’). 26. During the courses of Dutch sociolinguistics (University of Antwerp) I was repeatedly confronted with this, when conversing with my students, nearly all of them living in the Brabantic area, and more in particular in the province of Antwerp: why should they adopt ‘Hollandic’ forms?; why not use ‘their own language’? ‘Their own language’ not being a local Brabantic dialect, but the ‘Brabantically coloured’ ‘intermediate variety’, which they use ‘always and everywhere’ in colloquial speech.

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