Belgian Dutch versus Netherlandic Dutch: New patterns of · PDF filelyse the present state of colloquial Belgian Dutch and the changes which mark this condition. This paper discusses

Belgian Dutch versus Netherlandic Dutch:New patterns of divergence?

On pronouns of address and diminutives

REINHILD VANDEKERCKHOVE

Abstract

The linguistic climate in northern Belgium (Flanders) has been changingin recent years. A new corpus of spoken Dutch meets the need for datareflecting actual and present-day language use in this part of the Dutchlanguage area. The ‘Spoken Dutch Corpus’ allows us to uncover and ana-lyse the present state of colloquial Belgian Dutch and the changes whichmark this condition. This paper discusses the realization of two morpho-syntactic variables, the variants of which are markers of Belgian Dutchversus Netherlandic Dutch. In spite of more than half a century of officiallanguage policy promoting convergence with northern Netherlandic Dutch,the results reveal a growing divergence from the northern norm: the youn-ger generations show a greater preference for the endogenous, Brabantic,variants than the older generations. The northern Dutch variants have notbeen integrated in colloquial Belgian Dutch. Apparently they are still con-sidered to be ‘Hollandic import’.1

1. Introduction

Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French and German. Thesouthern, Walloon, provinces of Belgium are French-speaking, exceptfor a small German-speaking area alongside the German border. Thenative speakers of German (ca. 71,000) constitute a small minority inBelgium. In the northern, Flemish, provinces, Dutch is the official lan-guage. Brussels capital region is officially bilingual. The Dutch-speakingcommunity in Belgium outnumbers the French-speaking community byca. 6 million to ca. 4 million native speakers.

Dutch-speaking Belgium constitutes one contiguous area with theNetherlands (20 million inhabitants) which is situated north of the Bel-gian Dutch area and where Dutch is the official language as well. Al-though northern Belgium (Flanders) and the Netherlands share the same

Multilingua 24 (2005), 379�397 01678507/2005/024�0379� Walter de Gruyter

380 Reinhild Vandekerckhove

language, there are quite a number of distinctive elements in both gram-mar and lexis which explain why terms such as ‘Belgian Dutch’ and‘Netherlandic Dutch’ function as key notions in much of the literatureon the Dutch language situation. Yet, labelling Dutch as a pluricentriclanguage with two interacting centres (cf. Clyne 1992) was considered tobe problematic until recently,2 because the powerful base has long beensituated in the Netherlands: the national variety of the Netherlands func-tions as the official model for Standard Dutch in Belgium. In otherwords, the ‘codification has not been formulated in Belgium but in theneighbouring Netherlands’ (Willemyns and Bister 1989: 543).

The explanation has to be found in the (previous) history of the stan-dardization process in Flanders: until 1930 Dutch hardly functioned as anational, cultivated language in Flanders. French was used by the upperclasses. It dominated education, administration, politics and public lifein general, although the vast majority of the population spoke Dutch,or, rather, regional varieties of Dutch. For a long time hardly any supra-regional variety of Dutch was used in Flanders, because French wasomnipresent in those domains in which a supraregional variety wasneeded. In other words, the language situation in Flanders was strictlydiglossic, with French as the high variety and Dutch as the low variety.This situation gradually changed at the end of the 19th century and thebeginning of the 20th century, culminating in the language laws of the1930s. Since 1932, Dutch has been the only official language in Flanders.At that time, Flanders was in need of a standard language. The debatebetween the ‘particularistic movement’, which wanted to give Flanders astandard language of its own, and the ‘integrationist movement’, whichwanted the Dutch language area to have one and the same standard lan-guage, was won by the latter group. This implied that Flanders decided toadopt the Dutch standard language of the Netherlands. But it took manydecades before one could speak of a more or less generalized command,let alone use, of the standard language in Flanders (cf. Goossens 1975).

In the past few decades, quite a lot of research has been inspired bythe question of whether Belgian Dutch is converging with northern,Netherlandic Dutch or whether diverging tendencies are prevalent. Ithas become clear that there is no unambiguous answer to this question:divergence on the phonological level appears to be accompanied by con-vergence on the lexical level (cf., e. g., Van de Velde 1996 and Gronde-laers et al. 2001). In this paper I would like to to ‘revisit’ the topic,assuming that there are at least three pertinent reasons for doing so.First of all, the linguistic climate in northern Belgium, or Flanders, haschanged so drastically in recent years that an update of the research onthe topic is needed. Secondly, research on the relation between BelgianDutch and Netherlandic Dutch has mainly dealt with lexical or phono-

Belgian Dutch versus Netherlandic Dutch 381

logical variables. By focusing on some morpho-syntactic variables wemight be able to add a new dimension to the discussion. Thirdly, theavailability of a new and large corpus of spoken Dutch (see below),offers new possibilities for the study of spoken Dutch in all its diversity.

A highly significant variable which deserves more attention than it hasreceived until now, is the realization of the pronoun for the 2nd personsingular in Belgian Dutch, more particularly in spoken Belgian Dutch.Vermaas (2002) offers an extensive and fascinating analysis of the evolu-tion of the pronouns of address in (Netherlandic) Dutch between the13th and 20th century, but hardly deals with present-day Belgian Dutch.

This paper will mainly focus on pronouns of address in spoken Bel-gian Dutch, but the changing patterns in the realization of the pronomi-nal variable will also be compared to the realization of another variablewhich can also be considered to be symptomatic of the present conditionof spoken Dutch in Belgium: the realization of the diminutive suffix.

2. The Spoken Dutch Corpus

Our data were extracted from the sixth release of the ‘Spoken DutchCorpus’ (SDC). The SDC is a large digital database of contemporaryStandard Dutch as spoken by adults in the Netherlands and Flanders atthe beginning of the 21st century.3 The corpus contains several text types.For the present study only so-called spontaneous face-to-face conversa-tions were used, more particularly the available orthographic transcrip-tions of those conversations which were conducted by two or three infor-mants. The corpus aims at a well-balanced geographical representationof the different dialect groups through its choice of informants. For

Map. Dutch-speaking northern Belgium (� Flanders) with its five provinces.


Table 1. �Please give a heading to this table here!!�

Average age Number of Number of Number ofin 2003 informants tokens tokens

pronoun diminutive

West-Flanders younger 27 12 1,802 220older 59 5 631 126

East-Flanders younger 29 8 881 189older 59 4 242 30

Brabant younger 26 15 1,598 332older 62 6 599 162

Limburg younger 25 9 1,215 118older 56 12 1,254 144

Total 71 8,222 1,216

northern Belgium, the four main dialect regions are represented, i. e.West-Flanders (capital: Bruges), East-Flanders (capital: Ghent), Lim-burg (capital: Hasselt) and finally the Brabantic area, which comprisesthe provinces of Flemish-Brabant (capital: Leuven) and Antwerp (capi-tal: Antwerp).

We analysed data from 71 informants, 35 men and 36 women, nearlyall of them highly educated.4 Two age groups were differentiated: theinformants in the youngest group were born between 1967 and 1982.The informants in the older generation were born between 1938 and1956.5 48 hours of speech were extracted. They provided 8,222 tokens ofthe 2nd person singular pronoun (subject, object and possessive). For thediminutive variable, we have far fewer tokens that are ‘relevant’ (cf.below).

Table 1 shows the relative representation of the different age groupsand geographical groups and the number of tokens available for eachcell. The unequal distribution of the informants is due to the fact thatthe processing of the data for the corpus had not been finished whenthis research was carried out, which implies that there are still gaps inthe pool of informants. For three of the four regions, the older group isconsiderably smaller than the younger group.

Nearly all of the informants conversed with a friend or an acquaint-ance for three hours, though not continuously, at home, without a re-searcher being present. Consequently, the situation can be characterizedas being informal, in spite of the presence of a small digital recorder.The informants were free to choose the topic of their conversation. Thefact that all of the informants were asked to speak Standard Dutch toeach other is, however, highly relevant for the interpretation of the re-sults.


3. The singular pronouns of address

3.1 The pronominal paradigm for the 2nd person singular

For the pronominal paradigm for the 2nd person singular, there was andis an essential difference between endogenous colloquial Belgian Dutchand (northern-based or Netherlandic-based) Standard Dutch. Apartfrom some formal differences, there is also a structural difference: unlikethe Standard Dutch paradigm, the Belgian Dutch paradigm contains nocontrast between polite and informal forms. It is neutral with respect tothe power and solidarity semantic. Neither the presence or absence ofhierarchical relations nor the presence or absence of solidarity has reper-cussions for the choice of the pronoun because there is no distinctionbetween V-pronouns and T-pronouns (cf. Brown and Gilman 1964).6

Table 1 offers a survey of the pronouns in both varieties. In the cellscontaining two pronouns, the first one is the weak (unaccented) variant(e. g. je), while the second one is the strong (accented) variant (e. g. jij).The term ‘colloquial’ refers essentially to spoken Dutch as it is used ineveryday conversation in Belgium, although an exception must be madefor certain varieties of ‘netspeak’ (chat language, language in e-mails)which are often very informal and therefore often display the same char-acteristics as the ones ascribed to informal colloquial Belgian Dutch7.

Some examples may illustrate the differences:

(1) ‘You sleep a lot’(a) Informal � formal (colloquial) Belgian Dutch: GE slaapt veel(b) Informal Standard Dutch: JE slaapt veel(c) Formal Standard Dutch: U slaapt veel

(2) ‘I saw you yesterday’(a) Informal � formal (colloquial) Belgian Dutch: ik zag U gis-

teren(b) Informal Standard Dutch: ik zag JE gisteren(c) Formal Standard Dutch: ik zag U gisteren

The differences illustrated in (1) are purely formal: the Belgian Dutchcolloquial variant is ge instead of je. Example (2a) illustrates a functionaldifference: (2a) is perfectly acceptable in Standard Dutch, but it expressespoliteness, distance, absence of solidarity (cf. 2c). In colloquial BelgianDutch this utterance can be used to address a good friend or a familymember (expressing solidarity). Just like possessive uw and subject ge,object u is neutral with respect to formality, familiarity and solidarity incolloquial Belgian Dutch.8

Since the official standard language in Dutch-speaking Belgium corre-sponds to the standard language spoken in the Netherlands, the pro-



Subject Object Possessive

Standard Dutch je / jij je / jou je / jouwINFORMAL

Standard Dutch U u uwFORMAL/POLITE

(Colloquial) Belgian Dutch ge / gij U uwINFORMAL � FORMAL

nominal paradigm for the 2nd person singular used, for example, in writ-ten language, in education and in the media is the northern-based Stan-dard Dutch paradigm. However, there seems to be a clash between thesedomains and registers and everyday spoken language in informal do-mains.

Research showed that the Standard Dutch polite form u (subject) wasintegrated much earlier and more easily in the speech of Flemings intend-ing to speak Standard Dutch than its informal counterpart je and itsstrong variants.9 A quarter of a century ago, Deprez and Geerts (1977:371) stated: ‘the problem is that je presupposes familiarity and solidarity,whereas for most Flemings only ge has those connotations’.10 Yet, itcould be assumed that it would not take long before the northern pro-noun je would be integrated into the colloquial speech of Flemings. Thesixties and the seventies of the previous century were marked by inten-sive campaigns both in education and in the media, the aim of whichwas to make Flemings familiar with the northern Dutch standard lan-guage. More particularly, the pronoun je was systematically propagatedin secondary schools from 1960 onwards (Deprez and Geerts 1977: 159).As a consequence, Flemings gradually became familiar with this pro-noun. It was to be expected that this growing familiarity would be re-flected in an increasing use of it. The SDC allows us to investigatewhether this expectation has come true. The results presented in 3.2might answer the question as to what extent the northern pronouns je,jij and jou(w) have been integrated in informal spoken Belgian Dutchat the beginning of the 21st century. By analysing spontaneous speech,11

we intend to add a new dimension to the research on the developmentof supraregional Dutch in northern Belgium.

3.2 Result

Figure 1 presents the relative frequency scores or the percentages forthe three subject variants: Belgian Dutch ge/gij, Standard Dutch je/jij,


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Figure 1. Northern Dutch je versus Belgian Dutch ge in subject funtion.

Standard Dutch (but formal and polite) u.12 Since there is consider-able � and apparently significant13 � regional variation, the distinctionaccording to the region of origin has been preserved in this survey. Theuse of the je-pronoun appears to decrease from west to east, and, in acomplementary way, the use of the endogenous ge-pronoun increasesfrom west to east.

The pronoun u hardly plays a role in subject function, which is notsurprising in view of the informality of the speech situation. West-Flan-ders clearly stands apart: je has a frequency score of nearly 80 percentfor this region, whereas in the other regions the ge-pronoun is by far thedominant pronoun.

If we distinguish the frequency scores for the use of the StandardDutch pronoun je by age group, the same regular pattern emerges forthe younger group. For the older group, however, the overall picture isvery irregular:

The age group differences are significant for all regions.14 The datafor the older East-Flemish group clearly stand out, due to the extremelylow frequency score for the je-pronoun, but they should be dealt withcarefully in view of the limited number of tokens available for this group(cf. Table 1). Nevertheless, in one respect both the data for East-Flandersand the data for West-Flanders come up to the expectations: the youngergeneration has higher frequency scores for the Standard Dutch je-pro-noun than the older one. For the Brabantic and Limburg area, however,we get the reverse pattern: the je-pronoun is less well represented in thespeech of the younger informants than it is in the speech of the olderinformants. Yet it can be assumed that the younger generation is muchmore familiar with the je-paradigm than the older one. The je-pronounshave been propagated systematically in education only since the 1960s,


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Figure 2. The use of the Standard Dutch pronoun je in subject function by the ‘youn-ger’ and ‘older’ generation.

which implies that some of the informants of the older generation mayhave learnt the je-paradigm at school, but for many of them the presenceof the je-pronoun in their linguistic education must have been very pre-mature or just non-existent. It is beyond doubt, however, that all of theyounger informants learnt how to use the je-paradigm at school. Butthis greater knowledge and command of the je-paradigm do not corre-spond to a more intensive use of it by the Brabantic and Limburg infor-mants: in informal contexts the interlocutor is in a vast majority of casesaddressed with ge or gij, in spite of the fact that Standard Dutch wasthe variety to be used.

In some respects these data strikingly mirror the results of Kremer(2000). Kremer questioned Flemish informants about their use of thepronoun ge versus je (and the polite form u) in several domains orcontexts. The research design of Kremer differs from the approach pre-sented here, because it deals with reported speech and does not focus on(intended) standard language. The question in Kremer (2000) is not‘Which variants do you use when speaking Standard Dutch?’, but‘Which variants do you use in contexts x and y?’ Most of the SDC-informants converse with a friend or a colleague from the same agegroup. One of Kremer’s questions (2000) relates to language use withpeers: 61 percent and 64 percent of the lower and middle class infor-mants respectively of the youngest age group questioned in 1985, all ofthem living in the provinces of East-Flanders or Antwerp, report usingge when addressing peers. A comparable enquiry in 1995 offers no datafor language use with peers, but it does contain data on language use inthe intimate family circle, more particularly with regard to conversation


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Figure 3. The use of Standard Dutch je/jou versus Beligian Dutch u in object function.

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Figure 4. The use of Standard Dutch je/jouw versus Beligian Dutch uw in possessivefunction.

with parents: 82 percent of the younger informants questioned in 1995report that they use ge when addressing their parents (Kremer 2000: 18,21). 64.96 percent of the East-Flemish and 78.43 percent of the BrabantCSD-informants effectively use ge when addressing someone from thepeer group, even when required to speak Standard Dutch. Although weshould be careful when comparing both studies, the results suggest thatde CSD-informants hardly adapt their ‘normal’ speech habits to the re-cording situation and the specific task they were given: to speak Stan-dard Dutch. This might imply that the barrier to using the pronoun jeis still insurmountable for many informants, or, in other words, that je(jij) is still considered to be too much of an exogeneous form to be usedwith peers.

The representation of the je-pronoun in the CSD is even weaker inobject and possessive function.15 The data in Figures 3 and 4 merely



Subject Object Possessive

Standard Dutch JE-paradigm 35.72 % 20.48 % 16.51 %Belgian Dutch GE-paradigm 63.48 %16 79.5 % 83.48 %

represent the scores for the younger generation, as in some cases therewere not enough tokens for the older generation.

East-Flanders, Brabant and Limburg now clearly constitute a fairlyhomogeneous region: object u and possessive uw, both of them being theendogenous Belgian Dutch variants representing the ge-paradigm, getfrequency scores of 80 percent and more in those regions. As was pointedout before, object u and possessive uw are part of the Standard Dutchparadigm as well; however, within the Standard Dutch paradigm theyfunction as polite forms. Here, they function as informal pronouns ex-pressing familiarity, which is excluded in Standard Dutch. In West-Flan-ders, the je-forms are slightly in the majority in object function, but inpossessive function they give way to the ge-paradigm, represented bypossessive uw.

The unequal functional distribution of the je-pronoun is illustrated inTable 3, which comprises the results for all of the informants and re-gions.

The je-pronoun is better represented in subject function than in objectand possessive function. This implies that at least some informantsswitch from the je-paradigm to the ge-paradigm or vice versa to someextent, depending on the function of the pronoun. More particularly:some informants use Standard Dutch je in subject function but endoge-nous u and uw in object and possessive function.

(3) Heb je al geoefend met uw fiets?‘Have you exercised with your bicycle?’

Part of the explanation for this imbalance probably lies in the fact thatthe object and possessive form of the ge-paradigm, i. e. u and uw, arepart of the northern-based Standard Dutch paradigm as well, thoughbelonging to another register (cf. the supra register). This may explaintheir stronger ‘resistance’ to the Standard Dutch informal forms je andjou (w). They are probably not felt to be deviant from Standard Dutchto the same extent as the subject form ge (gij), which has no equivalentin Standard Dutch.

The finding that the Standard Dutch je-pronoun is better representedin subject function than in object and possessive function corroborates


to some extent the findings of Goossens (1990), which were based onanalyses of written Dutch by Flemish university students in 1981 and1989. Goossens observed a partial adoption of the northern-based Stan-dard Dutch system by Flemish students: many of them appeared toswitch consistently between the je-paradigm and the ge-paradigm, usingpronouns from the first paradigm in subject function and pronouns fromthe latter in object and possessive function. Goossens (1990) interpretsthis phenomenon in terms of an intermediate phase and predicts a nextphase constituting a generalized use of the Standard Dutch informalpronoun. Although no secondary research of this type has been done onwritten Belgian Dutch, it is beyond doubt that this has effectively hap-pened: in written language the use of the Standard Dutch paradigm hasbeen generalized.17 As can be deduced from the figures above, this gener-alized use of the je-paradigm certainly does not hold for the informalspoken speech of the younger informants. And what is more: althoughthe results in Table 3 do mirror Goossens’ findings to some extent, theje-paradigm is so weakly represented even in subject position, that thereis no ground for stating that the intermediate phase which was registeredfor written Belgian Dutch more than two decades ago, has been reachedin informal spoken Belgian Dutch by now.

Another striking finding concerning the distribution of the pronoun,lies in the fact that the pronoun je in subject position is much betterrepresented in enclitic position than in proclitic position. This impliesthat example (4) is less likely to occur in the corpus than examples (5)or (6):

(4) Je komt (‘You come’)

(5) Kom je (‘Do you come?’)

(6) Ik hoop dat je komt (‘I hope that you come’)

This might be explained both in terms of the dialect geography of north-ern Belgium and in terms of the je-pronoun being less conspicuous inenclitic position. However, we will not enlarge on this aspect here (cf.Vandekerckhove 2004).

The overall conclusion is that many decades after the pronoun je wasimported into northern Belgium (Flanders) and was firmly rooted inofficial Standard Dutch as it is being used in Flanders, in written lan-guage, in education, in the media, it has acquired only a very modestposition in the informal spoken supraregional Dutch of most Flemings.The data for Brabant and Limburg even suggest it is on its way down inthis register.


Looking for an explanation for this phenomenon, we have to turn tothe changing or the changed linguistic climate in Flanders. While in thesixties and seventies of the previous century many efforts were made bypublic services, by the media, by teachers and by laymen to bring theDutch standard language within the reach of every Fleming, we nowobserve a kind of change from below: Flemings increasingly use a su-praregional language variety with strong Brabantic influence. It hasoften been called an ‘intermediate language variety’18 because, from astructural perspective, it is situated in between the standard languageand the Brabantic dialects. This so-called intermediate variety increas-ingly seems to function as a kind of general Flemish colloquial variety.It has penetrated into domains in which the standard language pre-viously was the unmarked medium. Symptomatic is, for example, itsomnipresence in TV-programs focusing on entertainment nowadays. Tothis fact it owes its � somewhat ironic and hardly flattering � nickname‘soap-Flemish’ (Geeraerts et al. 2000). The fact is, however, that Flan-ders increasingly seems to rely on a language centre of its own, viz. theBrabantic area, at the same time turning away from the northern norm.

One of the indisputable exponents of this Flemish colloquial variety isthe pronoun ge. It is an endogenous Brabantic pronoun, which is alsopresent in the East-Flemish dialects and to a minor extent in the Lim-burg and West-Flemish dialects. The pronoun je however, is, to a smalleror greater degree,19 an endogenous pronoun in West-Flanders as well.This might explain the higher scores for the Standard Dutch pronoun inWest-Flanders and consequently the outsider position of this province,to some extent. However, the peripheral position of the province, withEast-Flanders functioning as a kind of buffer which separates West-Flanders from the Brabantic area, might be an explanatory factor aswell.

4. Comparative material: The diminutive suffix

The choices present in the second variable presented here can generallybe interpreted along the same lines. For Flemish speakers of Dutch twodiminutive suffixes are available: /j �/ and /k �/. Both of them have anumber of allomorphs, depending on the phonetic context in which theyare used:

/j �/: [J �], [ � tj �], [pj �], [tj �]: e. g. knoopje (‘small button’), man-netje (‘small man’), boompje (‘small tree’), boontje (‘small bean’)

/k �/: [k �], [ � k �], [sk �]: e. g. knoopke (‘small button’), manneke(‘small man’), bankske (‘small bench’)



DIMINUTIVEsuffixes

Standard Dutch -jeColloquial Belgian Dutch -ke: in most phonetic contexts

-je: in a limited number of phonetic contexts

The -ke-suffix is a typical exponent of colloquial Belgian Dutch, the -je-suffix is the Standard Dutch realization.

The -ke-suffix is strongly represented both in the dialects of Dutch-speaking Belgium and in supraregional colloquial Dutch in Belgium.However, its counterpart -je does not mark Netherlandic Dutch exclu-sively. In most dialects of Dutch-speaking Belgian both -je and -ke arepresent. The distribution of these morphemes and their allomorphs isdetermined by the phonetic context. Historically speaking, -je is the pala-talized version of the original -ke-suffix. The presence of the palatalizedsuffixes increases from east to west. In the western part of West-Flan-ders, the -je-suffix is used in all phonetic contexts. The other extremecan be found in the southern part of the Brabantic area, where the -ke-suffix is used in all phonetic contexts.20 So, just like the pronoun ge, thesuffix -ke is a typical Brabantic realization, although in large parts of theBrabantic area, the -je-suffix is present as well, though only in a verylimited number of phonetic contexts, e. g. words ending in /n/ precededby a long vowel, a diphthong or a schwa nearly everywhere demand thediminutive suffix -je: tuin-tje (‘small garden’), teen-tje (‘small toe’). Thesame is true for words ending in /t/ preceded by a long vowel or a conso-nant, e. g. straat-je (‘small street’), krant-je (‘small newspaper’). In allother contexts the Brabantic dialects demand -ke. This also holds for thesupraregional colloquial language which is used in the Brabantic areaand beyond the borders of that area. In fact, this wide distribution ofthe suffix -ke and limited distribution of the suffix -je marks the so-called‘intermediate variety’ which is increasingly used as a kind of generalBelgian Dutch (Flemish) colloquial variety (cf. the supra register). Atthe same time, it implies another morphological distinction between theBelgian Dutch colloquial variety and Standard Dutch. The latter ismarked by an exclusive use of the -je-suffix in all phonetic contexts.Consequently, a pertinent question is which diminutive suffixes are usedby Flemings nowadays, and more particularly by Flemings who intendto speak a supraregional variety, and, in the case of the informants forthe Spoken Dutch Corpus, who were required to speak Standard Dutch.

In view of the distribution of the -je- and -ke-suffix in northern Bel-gium, two choices have to be made when analysing the Spoken DutchCorpus:


� Either all of the diminutives can be included in the analysis or aselection can be made so that only the diminutives in which -ke or -jereally function as variants in larger parts of northern Belgium areincluded. The latter option seems preferable: in some phoneticcontexts (cf. the supra register) -je is the categorical form for mostregions of northern Belgium, which implies that -ke simply is notan option in those cases. Consequently, these phonetic contexts weresystematically eliminated from the SDC-material. They are not repre-sented in Figure 5 (cf. the infra register).

� Choosing this option implies another decision: which region func-tions as the reference point? The number of phonetic contexts inwhich -je is used categorically increases from east to west. If we se-lected the small Brabantic area, the dialects of which only have the-ke-suffix, then no tokens would have to be eliminated at all: in allcases the speaker can choose the -ke-realization present in his dialector the Standard Dutch -je-realization. However, the analyses of theSDC not only make clear that -ke is omnipresent in the corpus butalso, more importantly, that it is just never used at all in some pho-netic contexts, more particularly those contexts in which -je is cate-gorical in most of the Brabantic area. Eliminating these contexts re-sults in a more accurate view of the choices made by the informants.It could be argued that this ‘Brabantic’ distribution is not applicableto the speech of informants of other regions, e. g. the speech of West-Flemish informants. This is certainly true for the dialect use of thoseinformants, but our focus is not on dialect use, but on supraregionallanguage use. West-Flemings are confronted daily with the Brabantic‘intermediate variety’ on radio and, especially, television. So, al-though their dialect may persist to a major or minor extent, theirsupraregional speech certainly should also be interpreted in terms ofa choice between either the use of Standard Dutch variants (whichmay or may not correspond to the variants they use in their nativedialect) or the adoption of Brabantic elements (which also may ormay not correspond to the endogenous dialect variants).21

Figure 5 presents the relative frequency of the Standard Dutch diminu-tive suffix. Because of the extremely limited number of tokens for theolder East-Flemish generation, it presents no results for this group.22

Generally speaking, the Standard Dutch diminutive suffix appears tobe better integrated in colloquial Belgian Dutch than the StandardDutch pronoun je, which may be due to the fact that the former is notentirely absent in most Belgian Dutch dialects, whereas the latter formost regions is. In all other respects, the results appear to be highlycomparable to those for the 2nd person pronoun: the Standard Dutch


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Figure 5. The use of Standard Dutch diminutive suffix -je by the ‘younger’ and ‘older’generation.

realization is much better represented in West-Flanders than in the east-ern provinces. For the younger informants of the Brabant area the -ke-realization is dominant: it has a frequency score of 60.84 percent,whereas its Standard Dutch counterpart only stands for 39.15 percentof the tokens. The differences between younger and older perfectly paral-lel those in Figure 2 as well23: in West-Flanders the use of the StandardDutch realization appears to be still growing, whereas in the Brabantand the Limburg area, the use of the diminutive suffix -je decreases fromolder to younger. This is a remarkable trend, which once again runscounter to expectations as the younger generation certainly can be as-sumed to be more familiar with the Standard Dutch diminutive systemthan the older one.

4. Conclusion

The Standard Dutch (or Netherlandic Dutch) informal pronouns of the2nd person singular je, jij and jou(w) are still hardly integrated in thesupraregional colloquial language of most Flemings. There are consider-able regional differences but generally speaking, the Flemish ge-para-digm still dominates Belgian Dutch colloquial speech. This holds all themore for the region which has increasingly determined the developmentof (informal) spoken Dutch in Flanders in recent years, i. e. the Braban-tic area, which comprises the provinces of Brabant and Antwerp. Lim-burg and to a minor extent East-Flanders adhere to the Brabantic area.West-Flanders does not, which � quite ironically � implies that for thevariables presented here, the supraregional colloquial language of theregion which is known to have the highest dialect vitality in Dutchspeaking Belgium,24 approaches the standard language most closely. The


findings for the realization of the diminutive suffix are highly compar-able, but both the linguistic and the geographic distribution of the Stan-dard Dutch variants and the Belgian Dutch equivalents are more com-plex for the diminutive variable than for the pronominal one. Generallyspeaking the Standard Dutch diminutive suffix appears to be better inte-grated in colloquial Belgian Dutch than the Standard Dutch pronounje, which is linked to its distribution in northern Belgian dialects.

However, one finding which is highly symptomatic of the present-daycondition of Dutch in Flanders is clearly corroborated for both vari-ables: precisely in the region which increasingly appears to set the lin-guistic example for Flanders, the younger generation shows a signifi-cantly higher preference for the endogenous Belgian Dutch and moreparticularly Brabantic variants than the older one. This is even morestriking in view of the fact that, first of all, all of these younger infor-mants were required to speak Standard Dutch and that, secondly, all ofthem have a high level of education. The latter factor implies that theirlanguage choices cannot be ascribed to a limited command of the Stan-dard Dutch paradigm. The question is whether these choices reveal agrowing Flemish self-confidence or a growing anti-Hollandic attitude.Both factors might hold and reinforce each other, but several Dutchlinguists have remarked upon the latter tendency in the past decade.25

The SDC has allowed us to corroborate this tendency with present-dayspontaneous language data. They reveal that the pronoun je and itsstrong variants jij, jou and jouw have still not been assimilated to theextent that they are treated as endogenous forms by speakers of BelgianDutch. On the contrary, they are still considered to be Netherlandic(Hollandic) import.26 Although this probably is not applicable to theStandard Dutch diminutive suffixes to the same extent, we also observean increase of Brabantic variants for this variable. More than half acentury of official language policy promoting the use of the northern-based (Netherlandic) standard language could not prevent or suppressthis evolution, and appears to be increasingly unsuccessful in doing so.Consequently, the attitudinal component will have to be a major pointof interest in future research on language use in northern Belgium inorder to reveal the ultimate causes for Belgian colloquial Dutch diverg-ing from Standard Dutch instead of converging with standard (Nether-landic) Dutch, and, more particularly, in order to explain why, throughan ‘informal standardization process’, Dutch is increasingly becomingan pluricentric language with two centres of standardization.

University of Antwerp


Notes1. I want to thank both the anonymous reviewer and Marjan De Smet for their

useful comments on the first version of this article.2. Cf. Willemyns and Bister (1989), Geerts (1992).3. Information on the Spoken Dutch Corpus can be found on:

http://lands.let.kun.nl/cgn/home.htm.I want to thank Steven Gillis, Evie Cousse and Griet Depoorter (University ofAntwerp, Department of linguistics) for supplying the material and the softwarefor the exploitation of the corpus (COREX) and Daan Broeder (Max PlanckInstitute, Nijmegen) for offering practical solutions for the application ofCOREX.

4. 67 of the 71 informants have a high level of education, 4 informants have a mid-dle-high level of education. The latter group contains two informants from theyoung Brabant generation and two informants from the older Brabant generation.None of the informants has a low level of education.

5. The youngest group corresponds to ‘age 1’ and ‘age 2’ of the Spoken Dutch Cor-pus (cf. COREX), the older group corresponds to ‘age 4’ and ‘age 5’.

6. V-pronouns are used, for example, when there is no ‘solidarity’ between the inter-locutors, or for addressing someone who is considered to be superior, T-pronounsare used, for example, for expressing ‘solidarity’ or for addressing someone whois considered to be inferior. Brown and Gilman (1964) observe a shift from powerto solidarity as the governing semantic principle.

7. Cf. Reinhild Vandekerckhove and Annelies Van Rooy (in press).8. The pronouns ge/gij are not present in present-day Netherlandic Dutch, but it

should be mentioned that the pronoun gij can be found in Netherlandic Dutch inarchaic texts and especially in very solemn contexts, e. g. in prayer.

9. Peeters and Vercoullie (1930: 135), Deprez and Geerts (1977: 129), Kremer (2000)10. Original Dutch version: ‘Het probleem is … dat JE bekendheid, vertrouwelijkheid,

solidariteit veronderstelt, terwijl voor heel wat Vlamingen (gesprekspartners) enkelGE deze betekenissen heeft’ (Deprez and Geerts 1977: 371).

11. Goossens (1990) analysed the realization of the pronoun in written texts. Kremer(2000) deals with reported speech: East-Flemish and Antwerp informants are ques-tioned about their use of je versus ge. For the findings of both studies: cf. below.

12. For the absolute number of tokens, see table 2.13. Chi-square: df � 6, χ2 � 2480.647, p � 0.001.14. Chi-square per region: West-Flanders: df � 1, χ2 � 20.500, p � 0.001, East-

Flanders: df � 1, χ2 � 121.732, p � 0.001, Brabant: df � 1, χ2 � 105.784, p �0.001, Limburg: df � 1, χ2 � 17.381, p � 0.001.

15. Kremer (2000) contains no data for object and possessive function.16. The sum of this percentage and the one mentioned above is not 100 percent,

because one variant has not been included in the table: in 0.79 percent of thecases, the informants neither use je nor ge in subject function, but the polite stan-dard Dutch variant u.

17. An exception must be made for ‘netspeak’: in chatrooms Flemish adolescents pre-dominantly use the ge-paradigm (Vandekerckhove and Van Rooy 2004). This isrelated to one of the major characteristics of chatlanguage: its intermediate posi-tion between written language and spoken language (cf. Crystal 2001)

18. ‘Tussentaal’ is the Dutch term (cf. Taeldeman 1992).19. The use of the je-pronoun in West-Flanders increases from the south-east to the

north-west: in the south-east it is only used in enclitic position following a vowel,in the north-west it is used in both proclitic and enclitic position and in all pho-netic contexts (cf. Devos 1986)


20. The area includes large parts of Flemish-Brabant and the southern edge of theprovince of Antwerp. The city of Leuven constitutes the centre of this exclusive-ke-area. The city of Brussels and most of its suburbs have the ‘mixed system’demanding either -ke or -je depending on the phonetic context. (cf. Pee 1936/1938;De Vriendt 2000)

21. In the eastern West-Flemish dialects both the -ke-suffix and the -je-suffix are repre-sented.

22. Table 1: for the older East-Flemish group the corpus contains only 30 tokens withvariable use of -je and -ke, 24 of which were produced by one and the sameinformant, who consistently uses the Brabantic variant -ke.

23. The age group differences are significant: West-Flanders: df � 1, Chi-square �23.324, p � 0.001, Brabant: df � 1, Chi-square � 24.772, p � 0.001, Limburg: df� 1, Chi-square: Chi-square � 12.581, p � 0.001.

24. Cf. e. g. Vandekerckhove (1998, 2000).25. Taeldeman (1992: 13): ‘een anti-Hollandse reflex die tegelijkertijd gevolg en verd-

ere oorzaak van culturele divergentie is’ (an anti-Hollandic reflex which is boththe consequence and cause of cultural divergence), De Caluwe Devos (1998: 31):’Hollandofobie’ (Hollando-fobia), Goossens (2000:6): ‘Een belangrijk element vande inkapseling vormen de verspreide anti-Hollandse sentimenten in Vlaanderen.’(‘An important element of the encapsulation is the well-spread anti-Hollandic sen-timent in Flanders’).

26. During the courses of Dutch sociolinguistics (University of Antwerp) I was repeat-edly confronted with this, when conversing with my students, nearly all of themliving in the Brabantic area, and more in particular in the province of Antwerp:why should they adopt ‘Hollandic’ forms?; why not use ‘their own language’?‘Their own language’ not being a local Brabantic dialect, but the ‘Brabanticallycoloured’ ‘intermediate variety’, which they use ‘always and everywhere’ in collo-quial speech.

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Belgian Dutch versus Netherlandic Dutch: New patterns of · PDF filelyse the present state of colloquial Belgian Dutch and the changes which mark this condition. This paper discusses