The Rise and Fall of French Borrowings in Postmedieval Dutch

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the remarkable decrease in the use of French-origin loanwords and loan suffixes in Late Modern Dutch. We consider both changes to be lexical changes since the decrease in loan suffixes such as the verbal suffix -eren appears to result from a shift in certain lexical choices as well (Rutten/Vosters/van der Wal 2015). Our data come from the newly compiled Language of Leiden Corpus (LOL Corpus), developed at Leiden University in the context of a project on the historical Dutch-French contact situation. The main aim of the project is to assess empirically the supposed ‘Frenchification’ of Dutch in the Early Modern period (Frijhoff 2015). The LOL Corpus comprises data from seven social domains (Academy, Charity, Economy, Literature, Private life, Public opinion, Religion) significant in the history of the city Leiden from 1500 to 1899. Leiden was chosen as it was one of the important urban centers in Holland, attracting many migrants, including French-speaking labor migrants and Huguenots. The results for both words and suffixes borrowed from French show a gradual increase from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and a remarkable decrease from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The results partially confirm the ongoing and intensifying influence of French on Dutch in the Early Modern period, depending strongly however on the social domain involved (Assendelft/Rutten/van der Wal 2023a). At the same time, the results also show an unanticipated ‘Dutchification’ in more recent times. We relate these ‘Dutchifying’ lexical changes to the national language planning efforts emerging in the eighteenth century, following the rise of the standard language ideology from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. These language planning efforts led to the official codification of Dutch in 1804/1805, which targeted spelling and grammar. Previous research has shown the significant influence of the officialization of Dutch, both on the field of education and on language use (Rutten 2019). In this paper, we argue that the successful language policy had the surprising side effect of inspiring language users to exchange sometimes long-established loans for originally Dutch words.