Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Languages and Culture in History: A New Series
- Part I Approaches to Multilingualism in the Past
- 1 Codes, Routines and Communication: Forms and Meaning of Linguistic Plurality in Western European Societies in Former Times
- 2 Capitalizing Multilingual Competence: Language Learning and Teaching in the Early Modern Period
- Part II Multilingualism in Early Modern Times: Three Examples
- 3 Plurilingualism in Augsburg and Nuremberg in Early Modern Times
- 4 Multilingualism in the Dutch Golden Age: An Exploration
- 5 Literacy, Usage and National Prestige: The Changing Fortunes of Gaelic in Ireland
- Index
4 - Multilingualism in the Dutch Golden Age: An Exploration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Languages and Culture in History: A New Series
- Part I Approaches to Multilingualism in the Past
- 1 Codes, Routines and Communication: Forms and Meaning of Linguistic Plurality in Western European Societies in Former Times
- 2 Capitalizing Multilingual Competence: Language Learning and Teaching in the Early Modern Period
- Part II Multilingualism in Early Modern Times: Three Examples
- 3 Plurilingualism in Augsburg and Nuremberg in Early Modern Times
- 4 Multilingualism in the Dutch Golden Age: An Exploration
- 5 Literacy, Usage and National Prestige: The Changing Fortunes of Gaelic in Ireland
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Multilingualism and plurilingualism reflect two distinct practices and dimensions of social and cultural life: the coexistence of different languages at a variety of levels and settings in a given society, and the individual ability to master several languages simultaneously. Both reflect different forms of elasticity of the social fabric, and flourish in times of economic prosperity and global cultural contacts, whereas they may decline in times of contraction and nationalism. As a period of growth, mass migration and cultural flourishing, the Dutch Golden Age (c.1580–1750) is an excellent observatory for these phenomena. This survey insists in particular on the cultural aspects of language and their evolution, such as language acquisition, teaching and use, and its changing social meanings.
Keywords: Multilingualism, plurilingualism, language acquisition, language teaching, education, Latin, French language, cultural identity, Golden Age
Language pride or language pessimism?
How pathetic and downtrodden the Dutch language has become at the beginning of the third millennium. A twenty-second-century European would certainly look back in utter surprise at the pitiful, almost shamefaced way in which the Dutch were accustomed to discuss the fate of their national language in the world of culture and science a century earlier. By 2015, much had apparently changed since, 400 years earlier, in the first decades of the Dutch Golden Age, the Amsterdam Chambers of Rhetoric, known as d’Eglantier (Sweet Briar) or In Liefde Bloeyende (Blossoming in Love), had made a fiery plea to ‘help, embellish and enrich’ Low German (Nederduyts), the basis of present-day Dutch; or since 1586 when the engineer and linguistic purist Simon Stevin (1548–1620) had sung the praises of ‘the dignity of the duytsche [i.e. Dutch] language’. But especially since Johannes Goropius Becanus (Jan van Gorp from Hilvarenbeek, 1518/1519–1572) used etymological reasoning in his book about the origin of Antwerp (1569) to identify proudly ‘Cimbrisch’ or ‘Duyts’, that is to say what we now call Dutch, as the oldest and most perfect language of the world, the language of paradise itself, the lingua adamica. Abraham van der Myl (Mylius,1563–1637) in his academic treatise Lingua Belgica (Leiden, 1612) agreed with him.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Multilingualism, Nationhood, and Cultural IdentityNorthern Europe, 16th–19th Centuries, pp. 95 - 168Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016