Language planning in the Low Countries ( 1996 - 2005 ) : The Dutch Language Union

Dutch is a West-Germanic language spoken by approximately 22 million people worldwide. It is the official language of Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba – all of these are former colonies of The Netherlands – but most speakers (app. 21 million) live in the Netherlands or Belgium.2 In 1980, these two countries established the Nederlandse Taalunie (‘Dutch Language Union’, henceforth DLU), as a common governmental body which is responsible for the policies of both countries with respect to the Dutch language, language education and literature. Surinam became an associated member of the DLU in 2004. This article gives a critical overview of the activities of DLU, concentrating on the most recent decade 1996-2005, the period of EU expansion, and disregarding activities concerning literature and (mostly) language education as well as the position of Surinam, since none of these are central to our present concerns. As we will observe, ‘international’ developments, i.e. developments outside of the Dutchspeaking area, such as within the European Union, have not played an important role in discussions on language policy within our timeframe. To the contrary, it looks as if public interest has been much more concerned with internal debates. One might speculate that there is a correlation with a more general lack of interest in ‘European’ affairs. The population of the Netherlands voted against a European Constitution in a 2005 referendum –– there was no similar referendum in Belgium. There are several reasons why an overview of language planning policies within the Netherlands is of interest. First, since almost all policies in the Netherlands and Flanders concerning language have been coordinated by the DLU, studying language policies in the Low Countries to all intents and purposes equals studying the workings of the DLU: it is hard to think of somebody who is interested in issues of language policy in the Low Countries and who has not been engaged with the DLU in one way or another. Secondly, the DLU seems to be unique in the world; international governmental bodies to which all linguistic policies of several nation-states have been delegated do not exist elsewhere, to the best of my knowledge. They certainly do not exist in Europe. Thirdly, the intensive collaboration between these two EU member states – who have delegated basically all their policies on this terrain to this common body – may be seen as a model for a more closely knit European organisation. Finally, no scholarly literature exists on these issues, beyond some works which have been published under auspices of the DLU (e.g. De Caluwe et al. 2002) and work on DLU in a previous period (e.g. Goyvaert 1982, Willemyns 1984a, 1984b). Like all politics, language policies are the result of tension. In this article, we will see that one tension underlying the work of the DLU in the era described here has been the one between the opinions of linguistic scholars (sociolinguists, computational linguists) on the one hand and those of linguistic ‘laymen’ such as politicians, civil servants and the general public on the other hand. DLU has been active in trying to bridge the tension, applying insights from linguists where-ever this was possible. However, it has not always been very successful in doing this, and I analyse the potential causes for the problems. After giving some relevant background information on the history and organisation of DLU as well as on some political and cultural differences between the Netherlands and Flanders in section 2, I discuss issues in the ‘corpus planning’ policies of DLU — i.e. those issues