Can the language of young people in Flanders tell us something about the future look and sound of Dutch in Flanders? To answer that question we start from the results of recent research on the informal language of people between 18 and 24 years old. The recordings used are part of the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (CGN – Corpus of Spoken Dutch). When asked to hold an informal conversation in standard Dutch, most young people in Flanders will not use standard Dutch, but an intermediate variety between dialect and standard Dutch, the so-called tussentaal (literally: language-in-between). In the eyes of the propagators of the official language policy in Flanders this intermediate variety is unacceptable; people should either use dialect or standard Dutch, but not a mixture of both. In the eyes of the young people the tussentaal is no less than their mother tongue, and perfectly fit for all types of supra-regional informal communication. If urged to use standard Dutch, as with the CGN recordings, they will make a few adjustments – lexical, phonological, morpho-syntactical – to their colloquial speech, but they will not switch to the standard code. This behaviour may be very informative when speculating about the status of Dutch in Flanders. However, if we want to know whether standard Dutch still has a future as a spoken language in Flanders, we need to collect more and better data on the linguistic perception and attitudes of the younger generations in Flanders.
Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, is experiencing growing intraand interlingual diversity. On the intralingual level, Tussentaal ('in-between-language') has emerged as a cluster of intermediate varieties between the Flemish dialects and Standard Dutch, gradually becoming the colloquial language. At the same time, Flanders is encountering increasing numbers of immigrants and their languages. This paper analyses the way Flemish language-in-education policy deals with perceived problems of substandardisation and multilingualism, in order to create equal opportunities for all pupils, regardless of their native language or social background. Both the policy and the measures it proposes are strongly influenced by different, yet intertwined ideologies of standardisation and monolingualism. By propagating Standard Dutch as the only acceptable language and by denying all forms of language diversity, Flemish language-in-education policy not only fails to create equal opportunities, but also reinforces ideologies that maintain inequality. Instead, language policy should be open towards language diversity, taking the role of teachers in forming and implementing policies into consideration.Keywords: language-in-education policy; standard language ideology; monolingualism; social inequality; Dutch in Flanders; Tussentaal Language policy: ideology, planning and practice Language policies are present in some form in all domains of society (Ricento, 2006). It is in the domain of education, however, that such policies have the most impact on the members of society, as language-in-education policies play a paramount role in how a society articulates and plans for the future of its members (Liddicoat, 2013). Official documents are the most overt and articulated forms of language policy, but policies also exist in more covert forms, underlying the practices of language use and language learning in education. As such, policies discuss societal beliefs and attitudes about the value of languages or language varieties: which languages or language varieties are considered to have the most value regarding future societal success for pupils, and subsequently have a place in the classroom? This inextricable link between policy and society is used by Djité (1994) to discern between two kinds of processes in language policy: (i) processes at the societal level, where certain problems (e.g. social inequality) are formulated, together with possible solutions and (ii) at the linguistic level, where the linguistic norms which a community will use (or is expected to use) are selected.
In this paper we will investigate the relation between regiolect formation and the emergence of tussentaal (‘interlanguage’) in Flanders. More in particular, we will try to find out to what extent tussentaal is the product of regiolect formation as defined by Hoppenbrouwers (1990) and Hinskens (1993, 1996). In all Flemish regions a supra-regional interlanguage is gaining ground, with an indisputable Brabantic character. As for the intra-regional communication, the situation is different in the three regions under consideration. In the Brabantic region the traditional dialects are on the decline, except for the Antwerp city dialect, which – more than any other dialect – contributes to the formation of the Brabantic regiolect. In the West-Flemish region the traditional dialects are still fairly vital, but nevertheless a West-Flemish regiolect seems to be emerging too. In the East-Flemish region people tend to switch directly from the traditional dialects to the interlanguage. There seems to be no such thing as an East-Flemish regiolect. This regiospecific dynamics between dialect, regiolect (if any) and interlanguage makes for a very complex situation of language variation in Flanders today.
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