Tracing Frenchification

De Gruyter eBooks, pp. 37–56

Abstract

Dutch and French have been in contact for many centuries, with significant effects at the linguistic, social and discursive levels. The influence of French on Dutch has been criticized since at least the sixteenth century. The supposed verfransing ‘Frenchification’ of Dutch would be visible both at the level of the language (e. g. loanwords) and in situations of language choice and shift. Corpus-based analyses of the contact situation are still sparse. This paper offers one of the first empirical studies of the distribution of suffixes borrowed from French in a diachronic corpus specifically compiled for this purpose, i. e. the Language of Leiden Corpus. The corpus comprises texts from seven social domains from the city of Leiden, ranging from 1500 to 1900. We show that the originally French suffixes increase steadily from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, after which the frequency drops. High proportions are found in the domains Academy and Charity, low proportions in Literature and Private life. The preliminary results suggest that multilingualism was pervasive only among particular users and/or social domains.

Authors 3

1. Brenda Assendelft Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Universiteit Leiden

   Universiteit Leiden,

2. Gijsbert Rutten Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Universiteit Leiden

   Universiteit Leiden,

3. van der Wal Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Universiteit Leiden

   Universiteit Leiden,