History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 302

The use of Dutch in official domains was restricted almost immediately after the
change of power. Education continued to be mainly in Dutch during the 18th century.
On the one hand, the Intellectuals and men of letters in the 17thand 18th century, e.g.
Michiel de Swaen of Dunkirk, clearly insist on the unity of their language with the rest
of the Netherlands, especially with Holland. On the other hand, they are bilinguals
and they are very well informed about the cultural and literary events in France, so
that their works have often had a linking function between the French and the Dutch
cultural world. Moreover, in most cities French schools were established for the
French-speaking members of the army and the administration. Their presence must
have played an important role in the rise of a language shift, that later proved to be
irreversible. Consequently we see that by the end of the 19th century Dunkirk,
Gravelines and Bourbourg and their surrounding countryside had become
predominantly French (or Picard) speaking.
Yet, the linguistic situation did not change fundamentally until the French Revolution in
1789, and Dutch continued to fulfil the main functions of a cultural language during the
first century of French rule in this formerly monolingual Dutch region. There was an
intense literary activity in the circles of the ‘Rederijkerskamers’ (theatre companies)
and the French–Flemish chambers continued to participate in contests in the Austrian
Netherlands and vice versa.
A teacher fromCassel, Andries Steven, wrote a manual for language instruction in
1713, the Nieuwen Nederlandtschen Voorschriftboek, that stayed in use for more than
a century in many schools on both sides of the state border.
After the Revolution the new political ideology in France condemned all minority
languages, as remnants of an old feudal society, that had to be eradicated as soon as
possible. Nevertheless the teacher Pieter Andries from Bergues stated in his answer
to the inquiry of Grégoire about the ‘patois de France’ that his language was not a
dialect but ‘une langue raisonnée’ by which he indicated that Dutch still had the
function of a cultural language (De Certeau et al., 1975: 231–243).
During the 19thcentury, especially in the second half of it, educational legislation
banned Dutch/Flemish from all levels of education (Nuyttens, 1976). As a result, Dutch
gradually lost most of its functions as a cultural language. Its literary use became
mostly confined to regional items for the still popular local theatre, to folklore (Edmond
De Coussemaker, Chants populaires des Flamands de France, 1856) or just to
comical tales (Tisje Tasje’s Almanak; Moeyaert, 1978). The written language gained
an increasingly regional character as it was cut off from the linguistic evolutions in
Belgium and Holland, and also from the consecutive spelling reforms. In practice
however the teaching of Dutch continued in many elementary schools (namely those
that stayed under the influence of the clergy), and the Roman Catholic Church
continued to preach and teach the catechism in Flemish in many parishes until the
First World War. In this way the tradition of literacy-learning in Dutch was not
completely abandoned, persisting mainly among the local clergy.
Yet, the increasing use of French implied the functional loss of the old mother tongue.
The Frenchification did not immediately change the course of the language border;
rather it worked from within, from the little towns, where the bourgeoisie was the first
social class to give up their Flemish. As early as 1886, the parish-priest of Bierne
(near Bergues), answering a dialect inquiry made by the Louvain professor P.

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