Implementation and acceptance of national language policy: the case of Dutch (1750–1850)

Abstract

The paper discusses implementation and acceptance as crucial elements of a historical-sociolinguistic reappraisal of Haugen’s well-known theory of standardization. The case study that we focus on is the Dutch language in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. In this period, Dutch became an object of political control. Significant aspects of the nationalization of language were the establishment of an officialized orthography (1804) and grammar (1805), which were to be used in the national school system. Education was the societal domain in which the national government tried to secure the transmission of the national language norms. We study the implementation and acceptance of official language norms from two perspectives, viz. by focusing on teaching materials developed for the new national school system, and by analyzing a recently compiled corpus of original language data from this period. We argue that implementation and acceptance, though relatively understudied topics in standardization studies, can usefully be operationalized, and turned into empirical questions that historical-sociolinguistic analysis can answer.