Review of 

Willemyns, Roland (ed.). 2002. De taal in Vlaanderen in de 19de eeuw. Historisch-sociolinguistische onderzoekingen. Gent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde (Verslagen & Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 112/3. 371-603).

(Published 2003. HSL/SHL 3)

The volume comprises nine articles, which offer various points of view on the linguistic situation in Flanders during the nineteenth century. In “‘Liever Hollandsch dan Fransch’: taalcontact en taalconflict in het negentiende-eeuwse Vlaanderen”, Roland Willemyns sketches the situation of language contact and language conflict in nineteenth-century Flanders. This conflict is not restricted to the opposing Dutch and  French languages in the area, but it also includes the debate between what might be called particularists, those who aim at a southern variety of Dutch as a separate standard, and integrationists, who prefer northern Dutch as a joint standard language. Willemyns’ contribution provides a general framework for the research topics discussed in the rest of the book. These topics vary from education and language planning activities to analyses of syntactic and lexical  phenomena in nineteenth-century texts.

The teaching of the Dutch mother tongue in Flemish primary schools is explored by Henk van Daele, who in “Leesonderricht in de Vlaamse lagere school” concentrates on contemporary reading instruction, examining the influence of the modern, early nineteenth-century Dutch reading method - based on sounds rather than spelling - in Flanders. Jetje de Groof’s article “Een methodologische zoektocht naar de impact van taalplanning en taalpolitiek in Vlaanderen in de lange negentiende eeuw (1795-1914)” reports on her search for a methodology to draw up an inventory of language planning initiatives in order to interpret and evaluate them. In her exploratory effort, she distinguishes, among other things, various types of planning (status planning, corpus planning, acquisition planning and prestige planning) and domains (e.g. education, administration, jurisdiction, scholarship and science). The language of nineteenth-century local administration is the subject of Eline Vanhecke’s “Een eeuw ambtelijk taalgebruik: taal, spelling en woordenschat in de verslagen van het Willebroekse Schepencollege (1818-1900)”. In this contribution the Willebroek material is examined for its choice of language and for its orthography and lexis.

Comparing Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch vocabulary (in particular the onomasiological variation for the concepts “butcher” (vleeshouwer, slager, beenhouwer, slachter) and “neighbour” (buur, gebuur)), Dirk Geeraerts argues that the nineteenth century is a crucial period in the evolution towards the present-day situation (“De 19de eeuw als lexicale breuklijn”). In Timothy Colleman’s article (“De benefactieve dubbelobject-constructie in het 19de-eeuws Nederlands”), the benefactive double object construction, which is allowed by only a few verbs (e.g. inschenken “‘to pour”) in modern standard Dutch, is shown to be more productive in both Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch of the nineteenth century (moeder koopt haar dochter een nieuw kleed, “mother buys her daughter a new dress”). The history of linguistic norms plays an important role in J.M. van der Horst’s study of a Belgian syntactical phenomenon: the pervasion in the verbal end group (dat is iets waar we moeten aan denken, “‘that is something we should think of”; cf. the Netherlandic Dutch variant … aan moeten denken), a phenomenon which has been rejected in normative grammars.

Two foreign contributions offer some insight into the writing skills of members of the labouring classes in nineteenth-century Great Britain and Germany respectively. In “riting these fu lines: English overseers’ correspondence, 1800-1835”, Tony Fairman concludes that members of the labouring classes do not seem to have tried to write schooled English on any linguistic level except that of spelling and that, apart from some local features, they did not write dialect either. In “Van ‘Arbeitersprache’ naar ‘Bildungsstil’. Het Duitse onderzoek naar sociale stratificatie in de 19^de eeuw”, Wim Vandenbussche discusses core publications on the social stratification of nineteenth-century German. The German results have inspired similar sociohistorical research in Flanders.

My survey will have shown the variety of topics that the volume offers in its contributions, with the nineteenth century as its central element. Moreover, it has become clear that the articles deal with research in varying stages of progress. All this could easily give the reader the impression of having made a lucky dip, which the book indeed  in some respects aims to provide. However, readers who select articles to their liking will become familiar with the interesting, still largely unexplored field of the nineteenth-century linguistic situation in Flanders. To stimulate research in this field has been both the editor’s intention and the aim of the Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, which now regards this field as one of its main research interests.

Marijke J. van der Wal, Centre for Linguistics (ULCL)/Department of Dutch, University of Leiden, The Netherlands (contact the reviewer).