Roland Willemyns, Emeritus Professor of Dutch Linguistics at the University of Brussels, presents a broad history of Dutch for an international audience. Although in English, this rich book is aimed at specialists and advanced students of the language and expects familiarity with it (e.g. cartoons and some sample phrases are not translated). This is primarily a political history of the language. It traces the recognition and social relations of distinct varieties of Dutch across centuries and focuses on policy, standardization, and prestige. Fascinating illustrations of questions of linguistic form appear occasionally, such as variation in vowel pronunciation.
Pluricentric Dutch, with some twenty-three million speakers now, has been both a colonized language under the Spanish and French and a colonizing language in the West Indies, Suriname, and Indonesia. This book drives home the sociohistorical complexity of the language as both dominant and subordinated, imbricated in the Catholic-Protestant divide and multiple contact situations and borders. The book has three foci: the European evolution of the language (chapters 2–5); contemporary developments, particularly in dialect change/loss and sociolinguistic variation (chapters 6 and 9); and the overseas career of Dutch in East and West Indian colonies (chapter 7) and Afrikaans in South Africa (chapter 8).
The European historical sections address such epochal events as the Eighty Years' War against Spanish domination, which led to the split of Dutch-speaking ‘Low Countries’ between north and south. The south (Flanders) stagnated while the north (Holland) consolidated its seventeenth-century Golden Age, leading to the enduring standardization of Dutch on a northern model. Chapter 4, on the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and chapter 5, on the brief unification of the United Kingdom of Netherlands (1814–1830) and ensuing Belgian secession, offer provocative examples of language ideology, from the sixteenth-century assertion of Dutch superiority as a scientific language because it had the most monosyllabic words (81), to nineteenth-century extremist Flemish Catholics' preference for French because Hollanders' diphthongized vowels carried with them the false faith of Luther (133).
The chapters on colonial Dutch and the emergence of Afrikaans are most accessible to readers unfamiliar with Dutch. Willemyns highlights the colonial policy that withheld Dutch from the colonized in Indonesia, where authorities feared its spread would threaten the colonizing state and the purity of Dutch. Nonetheless, the political leaders of Indonesian independence were all fluent in Dutch; Sukarno wrote ‘Dutch is the language in which I do my thinking … when I am cursing, I am cursing in Dutch’ (201).
Willemyns emphasizes revision of received historical accounts, particularly of early language loss in the Flemish region, and throughout much of the book there is particular attention to a southern, Flemish perspective. This may owe to the fact that in their struggle with French, southerners have had to be more preoccupied with their language and its relation to the established prestige of northern Dutch. Indeed, as Willemyns writes, if we are looking for struggle for survival, multilingual conflict, hard battles for prestige, patriotic emotion—the stuff of much of this book—then for a significant period the southern Dutch-speaking area, particularly what was to become part of Belgium, ‘is the place to be’ (108–9).
