Ulrike Vogl

Of Reynaert the Fox : Text and Facing Translation of the Middle Dutch Beast Epic Van den vos Reynaerde

Table of contents - 6[-]Acknowledgements - 8[-]Introduction - 10[-]Text, translation and notes - 42[-]Editorial principles - 248[-]Middle Dutch - A short introduction - 258[-]Further reading - 274[-]Index of proper names - 280[-]Glossary - 284[-]Abbreviations - 285[-]Word index (semantic fields) - 348[-]Bibliography - 358[-]List of illustrations - 368[-]Contributors - 369

Standard language ideology and multilingualism: Results from a survey among European students

Abstract This article draws upon data from 1880 students across Europe, gathered through an online survey. It aims at identifying general trends regarding their beliefs about multilingualism: Are these still shaped by the dominant standard language ideology (SLI)? In the article, results from factor analysis that examined underlying dimensions of beliefs about multilingualism and language learning are presented. These dimensions are evaluated differently by subsamples of students. On the one hand, students are divided by national backgrounds; for instance, Central European students differ from Belgian students. On the other hand, variables such as geographical mobility play an equal role: Students who consider moving to another country differ in their beliefs from their peers who prefer to stay in their home countries.

Dutch: Biography of a Language

“Dutch – Biography of a language” by Roland Willemyns provides, quite traditionally, a chronological overview of the history of the language that we now call Dutch, from its unrecorded roots as part of the West Germanic languages and the oldest preserved documents from the area of the Low Countries, via characteristics of varieties of Dutch in the Middle Ages, to first efforts of standardization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and beyond. Within this chronological overview, however, the focus is on the social history of Dutch: “the book concentrates on the external history of Dutch, [...] the emphasis is on what happens with the language much more than what happens in the language” (p. xiii). Indeed, throughout the book, a lot of attention is paid to language practices within the social and political context of the time, for example multilingualism in the Burgundian Netherlands in the fifteenth century. The book’s most elaborate chapter is perhaps the one on the nineteenth century, a period which has received a lot of scientific interest in the past decades, especially regarding the southern part of the language territory (i.e. Flanders; e.g. Vandenbussche 1996; Vanhecke and Groof 2007; Vosters and Vandenbussche 2009; Rutten and Vosters 2011). Much of this research on nineteenth-century language use has been initiated by the author himself, a fact that made him an obvious candidate to write this new history of Dutch. The subsequent chapter on the twentieth century focuses on developments that were crucial for the Dutch standard language. Willemyns pays attention to the changing relationship between standard and non-standard varieties (with dialect loss as one characteristic), as well as to attempts at norm elaboration and codification aiming at unifying the Northern and Southern varieties. Unsurprisingly, he dedicates a section to the language conflict between Dutch and French in Belgium. The Low Countries, however, are only one of many sites of the history of Dutch. “Dutch – Biography of a language” also contains a whole chapter on “Colonial Dutch” with a lot of information about the history and present-day situation of Dutch in Surinam, the Caribbean, Indonesia and the United States,