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Pardon my French?
Dutch–French language contact in the Netherlands (1500–1900)
e-Book – Open Access 
ISBN 9789027243935
This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Dutch–French contact situation in the Early and Late Modern period, when the Dutch language and culture supposedly underwent frenchification in various spheres of life. Bringing together empirical approaches based on a wide range of datasets, this volume not only delves deeply into an intriguing case study in historical multilingualism and language contact but also offers detailed theoretical and methodological background information on how to analyse such an enduring contact situation from a historical-sociolinguistic perspective. The Dutch–French case is approached from three interrelated angles, focusing on the Netherlands between 1500 and 1900: contact-induced change in historical Dutch, language choice and language shift in the private and the public domain, and language-ideological change.
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 15] 2026. ix, 312 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 9 March 2026
Published online on 9 March 2026
© John Benjamins
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Table of Contents
- Preface | pp. ix–x
- Chapter 1. Introduction | pp. 1–10
- Chapter 2. Sociohistorical context and contact settings | pp. 11–33
- Chapter 3. Language-ideological conflict sites | pp. 34–62
- Chapter 4. Language choice in the public domain and in ego-documents | pp. 63–89
- Chapter 5. Language choice in private family correspondence | pp. 90–114
- Chapter 6. Language choice in business correspondence | pp. 115–134
- Chapter 7. Language choice and language shift in Leiden: The Luzac family | pp. 135–156
- Chapter 8. The Language of Leiden Corpus | pp. 157–169
- Chapter 9. Loan suffixes | pp. 170–192
- Chapter 10. Loanwords | pp. 193–235
- Chapter 11. Present participle constructions | pp. 236–257
- Chapter 12. Relative pronouns | pp. 258–277
- Chapter 13. Synthesis and research directions for the study of historical multilingualism | pp. 278–290
- References | pp. 291–309
- Index | pp. 311–312
“This innovative study constitutes a major contribution to the so-called ‘multilingual turn’ in historical sociolinguistics. In offering a detailed analysis of the historical Dutch–French contact situation in terms of ideology, language choice and contact-induced linguistic change across a variety of domains, both public and private, it opens up fresh and exciting theoretical and methodological perspectives on the study of historical multilingualism and language contact more generally.”
Wendy Ayres-Bennett