LL-L "Language varieties" 2008.01.18 (01) [E]

[Lowlands-L List]

L O W L A N D S - L  -  18 January 2008 - Volume 01
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From: Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong <Dutchmatters at comcast.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2008.01.17 (06) [E]

Hallo Ben, How interesting that you can now read "Dutch and Flemish" from
your screen reader.

And now you are interested to find out if there is any difference between
the two. Good question Ben!

There is no quick answer. Let me explain.

Dutch is a language which was cobbled together at the end of the sixteenth
century from many mutually understandable Low-land Dialects. Amongst those
were several that were being spoken by people that live in what is now the
Flemish speaking part of Belgium.

At that time the "Low lands" which comprised parts of present day
Netherlands and Belgium was embroiled in a fierce fight against the Spanish
King Philip II who 1. wanted too much tax money from the rich merchants up
North. 2. Wanted to centralize the juridical system and base it on a
professional codex and take away the old Lowland system of Common Law. and
 3. was fervently anti this new heresy, the Reformation. By the very end of
the sixteenth century the Provinces of Holland and Zeeland had seceded from
Spanish rule and formed their own Republic. The Belgian provinces were not
so lucky.

The reason for this new dictionary – which today is still present in the
hall where the Dutch government does its business - was that the Calvinistic
population of the newly formed Dutch Republic wanted to issue a new
translation of the bible from the original Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. The
attitude of these people was such that they did not want to include any
words directly derived from Latin (church- or otherwise) or French. Even the
new bible translation which had been made by newly minted protestants in
Münster (Germany) - in "Platt Deutsch" no less -  was found to be suspect
and therefore could not be used. It was the fervent wish of the Calvinists
in the Netherlands that this new bible would be used by the newly elected
government of the Republic as a guideline for their behavior and a trial
balloon to see whether they could not make the Republic into a protestant
theocracy.

(Fat Chance!).

From the moment we had that dictionary the Republic of the United
Netherlands which grew into the modern Kingdom of the Netherlands had an
official language. Since language became a business of the government a lot
of people switched over to that language from their different dialects. They
also made sure that children had to learn to read this language so that they
could read the bible for themselves and were not any longer dependent on the
priests to read and interpret it for them.

The Dutch speaking parts of what is now Belgium, however, did not manage to
liberate themselves from the Spanish oppression.

They did not benefit from a centralized language. The power structure was
such that the French speaking nobility looked down on the Dutch dialects
spoken by these people and they also had killed of a large percentage of the
Flemish speaking local influential rulers. The Flemish speaking part of
Belgium at that time was almost entirely agrarian and in the isolated
villages the local dialects grew further and further apart. It was not until
the beginning of the 20th century that education in Dutch was allowed by a
school system which fell largely under the influence of the French speaking
Cardinals, and that only in some places..

The situation in the time just before and after WWII was such that the
intellectual upper layers of the population spoke

"Northern Dutch" when they were in their official capacity, but at home
their local dialects were still spoken.

The resurrection of the economy in NW Belgium also gave renewed impetus to a
Flemish Movement which found that the mainly Francophile government paid no
attention to the needs of the Flemish population. This led eventually to
Belgium becoming a Federated Kingdom with a French, a Flemish, and a German
speaking part and an enclave around the capital, Brussels, where both
languages were spoken and tolerated.

In 1980 the governments of the Netherlands and that of the Dutch speaking
part of Belgium formed a Language Union and Declared that Dutch would be the
language of the entire Dutch-speaking lowlands area.

To answer your second question;. Are Northern Dutch and Southern Dutch the
same?. The answer is Yes and No. At this time dialectical Flemish is again
in the upswing, mainly due to the political uncertainties in Belgium itself.
One keeps hearing rumblings of the North wanting to segregate from the South
and then the speaking of your own dialect becomes a sort of "badge of
courage".

(to be likened to the way your gang dresses as opposed to f.i. the Crips)

Officially the two countries should speak and spell the same language, but
it will take a few generations before all Belgian "Dutch" speakers have
sufficient fluency.

Also there is a difference in "accent" , but the change from Northern to
Southern Dutch in not abrupt. There is also a difference in vocabulary. It
would be sad if we lost all the different colors in the language.

Ben, I do not know whether your system will recognize the difference between
the languages. I do know that officially there are two different corpora in
the two language systems, but I think for the moment the differences of
syntax and also pronunciation of identical words are a bigger problem in
telephonic translation systems.

So, that is my two cents worth. Have fun with your new toy. Jacqueline
----------

From: Marcel Bas <roepstem at hotmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2008.01.17 (06) [E]

Hi Ben!

Thanks for that question. It is an issue that a lot of people wonder about.
Let me start by saying that there is no such language as Flemish. Or, I'd
better say, what people regard as Flemish is in fact the Belgian version of
Standard Dutch, also referred to as 'Zuid-Nederlands'. When the present
Belgian state was founded in 1830, people needed a way to separate the
Romance from the Germanic language groups. I deliberately say 'Romance' and
 'Germanic', because the different home languages spoken by the Belgians
range from Picardian, Henegouwian, Franconian (i.e. Lëtzebuergesch), High
German, Flemish, Brabantish, Limburgish, etc. You could say that these are
Dutch and French language varieties.

By my knowledge, the way to separate the Romance ('French') areas from the
Germanic ('Dutch')  was done by splitting the country in half: the southern
half was named 'Wallonië' and had the Romance dialects, and the northern
half was named 'Vlaanderen'. This could facilitate state administration.
Consequently, whole areas were declared 'Flemish', whereas its inhabitants
were not Flemish. The provinces of Brabant (and later a new 'province' *
Antwerp*, too) and Limburg were turned into Flemish areas, whereas the truly
Flemish provinces in the west - Oost- and West-Vlaanderen - remained Flemish
(because, well, they had always been Flemish).

So the way see it, the Flemish language is confined to those areas in the
West of Belgium, and the other provinces had been named *Flemish* whereas
they're not culturally Flemish. Administratively they are Flemish, but that
does not mean that the Dutch spoken in all the provinces Of Brabant,
Limburg, Antwerpen, Oost- and West-Vlaanderen is *Flemish. *It's different
language varieties, and the lingua franca spoken in all provinces is a
southern variety of Standard Dutch. Truly Flemish is, for example, the
language that Roland Desnerck writes in.

The same has happened to *Wallonië*: There *is* a Walloon language, but it's
one of the Romance languages spoken there, although it's the largest
language spoken there. But in Wallonië people also speak Luxemburgish,
Limburgish, Lorrein, Champenois and Picardian, but we call them Walloons, so
we can categorise them as 'French' speaking. The words "Waal" and "Walloon"
mean "stranger", so I'm not so fond of this word for the linguistic status
of the southern half of Belgium; it neglects the regional languages spoken
there, and it reduces Romance inhabitants of the Lowlands as "strangers".

Best regards,

Marcel.

I now have access to Dutch from my screen reader. It has Belgian Dutch and
Holland Dutch, which is called "Regular dutch". I had a question about Dutch
versus Flemish though.

What is the difference between Flemish and Dutch. Are they different
languages? I've heard about Westflaams and so on, but if I put some Flemish
to this speech synthesizer, would it understand it being that it's looking
for Dutch?
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