When Thomas More’s Utopia was printed in 1516, the English humanist described the language situation of the fictional insular community as follows:
They study all the branches of learning in their native tongue, which is not deficient in terminology or unpleasant in sound and adapts itself as well as any to the expression of thought.1
Disciplinas ipsorum lingua perdiscunt. Est enim neque verborum inops nec insuavis auditu nec ulla fidelior animi interpres est.2
More sketches a monolingual ideal in which all the inhabitants of the island were able to understand each other.3 Their language allowed them to clearly express all their thoughts and opinions, as its vocabulary was rich enough to cover any topic.
It is striking to note how different this Utopian language ideal was from the context in which More’s book was printed. The first edition was published in Leuven, in the multilingual Low Countries. Whereas in the largest part of the region Dutch dialects were spoken as a first language, it also contained an area where varieties of French were the native tongue. These dialects presented significant differences, so that even within the Dutch or French language no uniformity existed. Next to these two native vernacular tongues, Latin continued to play a large role in several domains of public life. In fact, most printed books were published in Latin, even though it became increasingly possible to study ‘all the branches of learning in [one’s] native tongue’.4 This language situation came under scrutiny in the second half of the sixteenth century.
Although scholarly research has focused mainly on the defences and standardization of the Dutch language, the sixteenth-century Low Countries witnessed a much broader fascination with language and communication. Diverse answers were given to a wide range of questions: how to deal with the complex multilingual situation in the Low Countries? Was the dialectal variety a blessing or part of the Babylonian curse? Should one particular language or dialect be privileged? And how could the local French and Dutch vernaculars be improved?
The reflections on language in the Low Countries took place not just in Dutch-speaking circles, but also in French- and Latin-speaking ones. Even more importantly, the Dutch language was not the only topic of debate, as interest was also shown in other languages, particularly French. This aspect has been neglected in the monolingual research tradition, even though it is a logical consequence of the fact that the context in which the discussions took place was fundamentally multilingual. French and Dutch co-existed and interacted with each other in many professional and social domains. The aristocracy, for example, was primarily French-speaking. William of Orange himself—the pater patriae, or father of the fatherland, who led the Dutch Revolt—spoke better French than Dutch. The culture of the Low Countries was not Dutch, but multilingual.
By studying the language debates in the early modern Low Countries from the point of view of the local multilingual situation, insight is gained into the way in which every day multilingual experiences incited a diverse range of questions and answers. In specific professional and social environments, such as printing houses, the workforce was to some degree plurilingual, and was continuously confronted with the issue of communication and language. It was often in places like these that reflections and discussions on language arose.
Four such locales will receive special attention as hotbeds of discussion of language: the above-mentioned printing houses, but also French schools, Calvinist churches, and chambers of rhetoric. In order to trace the connections between daily experiences and views on language in the Low Countries, each of these four places is approached through a particular key individual whose life and participation in the discussions on language will form the starting point for further enquiries on the reflections that took place in this environment.
The language debates in the Low Countries were rooted in the local language context, but they also formed part of a larger early modern Europe-wide fascination with language. Everywhere, specimens of historical and contemporary languages were collected, compared, studied, and discussed. Many supporters of the Dutch vernacular took up arguments and ideas from the discussions that had been going on elsewhere, all the while evaluating to what extent they were also applicable to the Dutch tongue. At the same time, a sense of competition can be discerned between the different regions of the Christian world, as people started to compare and evaluate the various languages.
Within the broad Europe-wide fascination with language in the sixteenth century, the particular multilingual situation in the Low Countries gave rise to specific questions and answers. These concerned both Dutch and French, and occasionally even other languages. Through the focus on specific multilingual places, a wide range of voices can be heard, while connections can be seen with everyday language experiences. Meanwhile, the relationship with the discussions elsewhere in Europe will not be forgotten. New light will thus be shed on these debates in the Dutch- and French-speaking Low Countries. The discussions are treated in all their diversity, rather than as directed solely at the uniformization of Dutch.
T. More, Utopia (G. M. Logan & R. M. Adams, Eds.), revised edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 64.
T. More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation (G. M. Logan, R. M. Adams, & C. H. Miller, Eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 112, 154–156.
P. Swiggers, ‘L’Utopia de Thomas More : l’illusion de la réalité, peinte en langage’. In O. Pot (Ed.), Langues imaginaires et imaginaire de la langue (Geneva: Droz, 2018), 109–111.
More, Utopia (2002), 64.