Testing Frenchification: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of French Loan Morphology in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch

Gijsbert Rutten; Rik Vosters

doi:10.18290/rh237106.11s

Published : 2023-07-24

Vol. 71 No. 6sp (2023)

Testing Frenchification: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of French Loan Morphology in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch

Gijsbert Rutten

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6105-8949

Rik Vosters

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4939-1458

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh237106.11s

Abstract

There is a long history of social, cultural and political contact between the Dutch and French language areas, which has also resulted in language contact. In the Dutch language area, the cultural and linguistic contact situation has resulted in an anti-French discourse of alleged Frenchification from the sixteenth century onwards. The peak of influence from French is traditionally located in the eighteenth century. However, corpus-based research of the actual influence of French on Dutch in the Early and Late Modern periods is still scarce. We investigate the use of 31 French loan suffixes (e.g. the verbal suffix -eren, nominal suffixes such as -age and -teit, and adjectival suffixes such as -aal) in the Letters as Loot Corpus, which is a socially stratified corpus of private and business letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, written by men and women from various regions in the northern Low Countries. A regression analysis shows that the overall distribution of French loan suffixes is quite similar in the two periods, except for the capital Amsterdam, where there is a significant increase in the eighteenth century. Further significant effects are found for men and for the higher social ranks, and for business or mixed letters (as opposed to purely private letters). The results suggest that French-origin items entered the language of the northern Low Countries as relatively formal or conceptually written forms, mainly adopted by upper (middle) class men from the cosmopolitan city of Amsterdam.

Keywords:

Dutch, French, historical sociolinguistics, language contact, loan morphology

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Gijsbert Rutten

g.j.rutten@hum.leidenuniv.nl
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6105-8949

Affiliation:

Leiden University Netherlands

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Gijsbert Rutten is Professor by special appointment of Historical Sociolinguistics of Dutch at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. His research focuses on variation and change in Early and Late Modern Dutch, language contact, language policy, norms and ideologies. His current research project, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), concerns the Dutch-French contact situation between 1500 and 1900 with a special focus on language choice, language shift and contact-induced change. Recent publications include Language Planning as Nation Building. Ideology, policy and implementation in the Netherlands, 1750-1850 (2019), and a special issue of Language Policy co-edited with Rik Vosters: Revisiting Haugen: Historical-Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Standardization (2020). He is one of the editors of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (De Gruyter).

Rik Vosters

rik.vosters@vub.be
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4939-1458

Affiliation:

Vrije Universiteit Brussel Belgium

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Rik Vosters is an Associate Professor of Dutch linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he teaches courses in Dutch linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics. His research is situated in Dutch historical sociolinguistics, with a focus on the Early and Late Modern periods. He is also the coordinator of the FWO-funded research network (WOG) on historical sociolinguistics, an enthusiastic member of the Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN), and part of the editorial team of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (De Gruyter).