Frenchification in discourse and practice

Ondertitel:Loan morphology in Dutch private letters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

In this chapter, we discuss the influence of French on Dutch in the eigteenth and nineteenth centuries, when French is assumed to have been a prestige variety in the Low Countries. We focus both on ideological aspects of the language contact situation and on aspects of language use, viz. loan morphology. Whereas the period under discussion has often been described and criticized as one of frenchification (verfransing), both by contemporary commentators and by later (language) historians, this view has come under attack since Frijhoff’s seminal 1989 paper. Ruberg (2005) and Vosters (2011) have shown that despite contextually bound preferences for French, Dutch remained widely in use, also among allegedly Francophiles such as the upper classes. A corpus-based case study of French loan suffixes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century personal letters reveals significant social and regional differences, with loan suffxes being more frequent in southern than in northern letters, and more among the upper(-middle) ranks than among the lower(-middle) ranks.

ISBN:978-1-61451-583-8

Jaar van publicatie:2015

Trefwoorden:Frenchification, Language contact, Dutch, Loan morphology, Historical sociolinguistics