During one of his last days in office former Education Minister Halbe Zijlstra has saved the bachelor programme Minorities and Multilingualism: Into the Frisian Laboratory at the University of Groningen (RUG).
The minister granted the program a subsidy of 120,000 euro per year, the provincial government reported last Tuesday. The RUG will sponsor the programme for the same amount.
After a fire broke out in the village of Bozum, Friesland last week, the provincial authorities were upset to find out that the emergency services could have dealt with the situation better had the person on the line been able to understand Frisian.
The resident who called to report the blaze was not understood in their native language, which goes against agreements made with the emergency services.
“Frisian is the country’s official second language, and in case of an emergency, any Frisian should have the right to express themselves in their own language.” I would add to that, especially in their own province.
This definitely applies to the elderly and to anyone anywhere in the world in a panic, as we all revert to our first language when under duress. Many haters can easily say that any other language than Dutch in the Netherlands is second-class nonsense, and if everyone just spoke Dutch, the country would be fantastic. Wrong.
If we all spoke English, Chinese or Spanish the world would be at peace. I’m being sarcastic.
According to business facilitator Iamsterdam, the high level of English proficiency in the Netherlands is only surpassed by that of Norway’s. All the Norwegians I have ever met speak English, even foreign national Norwegians.
The Netherlands ranks second in a proficiency index carried out, reflecting the fact that almost the entire Dutch population speaks English, especially in the greater Amsterdam area, a fact attributed to all the foreigners living there.
Some 80% of the workforce speaks English, making Amsterdam the largest anglophone city in continental Europe. Some 90% percent of the workforce speaks two or more languages.
To all the blind policy makers that keep saying you need Dutch to get a job in the Netherlands: it’s not true: thousands of expats, foreign nationals and immigrants live and work for years without learning proper Dutch and do just fine, whether you like that or not.
(Link: iamsterdam, Photo taken from Dunglish, a site with Dutch-English mistakes)
Coming from Canada, a country that questionably prides itself on having millions of people speak English and French functionally, it’s odd to see that there are still discussions (if we believe the media) about having Dutch and European children learn foreign languages at school at a young age. There’s Dutch, then English, French or German, sometimes Spanish, and there are kids who already speak Frisian, never mind kids who speak Dutch dialects at home. All the kids who speak more than one language or dialect are at an advantage in general. All of this assumes the traditional ‘Caucasian’ Dutch person learning a foreign language, and totally ignores any child with a foreign background.
Profession Paula Fikkert makes an interesting point, which proves my usual point that language and culture are inseparable. When the second language in question is English, Dutch parents think that’s fantastic, but if that second language is Dutch and the first language is, let’s say Turkish, then all of sudden Dutch speakers get defensive. She mentions that Dutch policy makers will then automatically tell you how important Dutch is, even though linguists can easily explain why knowing any good native language is important.
This is a kind of language apartheid: English is the best, Dutch second or best in the absence of English, and anything else is of lesser value, while none of this is scientifically correct. Ironically, Dutch is best all the time socially, except in the ivory towers of some of Amsterdam and Rotterdam’s international corporations where the main language is English and only the cleaning staff are not able to join in, although could do so in more than one language. I’m speaking from experience.
The article also goes on about how sign language is treated as even lower than the rest for Dutch babies, but taking clases to try and decipher your baby’s gesticulations are all the rage.
Filed under: Science,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:56 am
A student had to write her thesis based on applied scientific research done in a company or institution, in this case, a hospital. The hospital demanded that her thesis be written in Dutch. The exam commission who will judge her thesis at the Radboud Univesity in Nijmegen demanded that her thesis be written in English.
The student couldn’t fulfil the requirements of her studies and decided to appeal the decision to be able to write her thesis in Dutch, which sounds weird. Exceptions have been made in the past to the English only rule, but that was then and those days are over: it’s English or nothing, which still sounds weird.
Her mentor also supported her appeal. It’s all fine that English be encouraged for the Dutch to be internationally recognised, but sabotaging someone’s studies to uphold a principle seems ludicrous. The University then blamed companies and institutions for not allowing students to do their thesis in English, but that doesn’t help this student at all.
Can’t it just be translated? In any case, if anything shows how English has became more important than Dutch (not that that is a good thing), this is a scary example of how things can go too far.
Filed under: General,Music by Orangemaster @ 2:37 pm
The once very popular Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) party has been losing a lot of ground particularly in provinces such as Limburg, to make a long story short. Interestingly, many prominent politicians such as Maxime Verhagen (right), currently Deputy Prime Minister (and first Dutch politician to Twitter) comes from Limburg, speaks dialect, especially as of late when asked to because it’s election time for the Dutch Senate.
Picture your favourite American or British band yelling ‘we love [fill in city or country of your choice]’ to woo the audience. And it works. In this case, Maxime loses points for not being able to fill in the blanks of a hugely popular song by Rowwen Hèze, Limburg’s number one ‘export’ who play American TexMex style music mainly in Limburgs dialect and have been around for some 20 years.
Presentator Twan Huys also from Limburg decided to see if Maxime wasn’t just ‘talking nonsense’ and made him switch to Maastricht dialect. At least he was able to fill that in. You could hear the sound of the students’ hearts strings twanging when ‘one of their own’ spoke their language.
The chorus of the song ‘Kwestie van Geduld’ (‘A Matter of Patience’) is in ‘standard’ Dutch on purpose.
” ‘t Is een kwestie van geduld,
rustig wachten op de dag,
dat heel Holland Limburgs lult,
dat heel Holland Limburgs lult.”
(’tis a matter of patience, waiting quietly for the day,
that all of Holland ‘yaps’ in Limburgs,
that all of Holland ‘yaps’ in Limburgs.)
The verb ‘lullen’ means ‘to bullshit’ or ‘talk nonsense’, but is much more neutral, so I went with ‘yapping’.
Holland is a large part of the Netherlands, South Holland and North Holland, a differentiation made by Limburgers to point out their cultural differences, especially their use of dialects in daily life instead of the ‘standard’ Dutch language.
No one give me a lesson on all of this, I’ve been hearing it for 12 years from my Limburg co-blogger.
Just two days ago I posted that “swear words in a foreign language are often perceived to be not as bad as in your own language,” and to back it up, here’s another carnival song called ‘Fok Joe’ (phonetic Dutch for ‘Fuck You’).
The opening shot of the ‘security guy’ has his Julian Assange look down pat, while singer Danny Panadero went as the doppelgänger of Pitbull, albeit with a mullet.
“I have a hit because there’s ‘fuck you’ in it,” the song of a Dutch ‘volkszanger’ (literally ‘folk singer’, but meaning ‘singer of the people’) who predominantly sings light ditties about love and life, a style that is popular in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany and very appreciated during carnival.
Around 1:40 Panadero is singing at a children’s birthday party and mentions that K3, one if not still the most successful Dutch-language act ever who sing kiddy songs, should sing “a fuck you” as well.
‘Fuck you’ in Dutch sounds too banal,
but sing it in English and the whole place sings along.
European inland navigation has language problems. Unlike international aviation, which uses English as the language of communication and has had plane crashes when people have not been able to speak it properly, inland navigation doesn’t have a rule about using a set language and so accidents continue to happen.
Many inland navigation organisations feel that the common language should be German simply because most inland waters are in German-speaking territory. However, speaking German instead of English with seafaring ships isn’t practical.
As of 1 January 2010, the Dutch Ministry of Transport and Waterways can issue fines to boats who don’t meet language requirements. What those are, nobody knows: learning terms off by heart or being able to chat about the weather? The Dutch Ministry issued a 240 euro fine to a French ship earlier this month for not being able to communicate enough in either English, German or Dutch. Needless to say the captain was really pissed, after 20 years of navigating to the Netherlands without any incidents. He didn’t know about these requirements because he had no problems before. And then other ships were also fined. The Dutch immediately thought that the French would reciprocate, which is not surprising. Never mind communicating on water, apparently the Dutch government isn’t able to communicate with Dutch shippers or European ones properly either.
One of the comments mentioned that it was silly for the Dutch to speak English among themselves if the official language was to be English. Again, aviation does that too. You first clear your business with the tower about where and when you will land, nasty accent and all, and then you can throw in a sentence of local language to show you’re friendly. It doesn’t bother pilots at all, it shouldn’t bother shippers either, eventually.
Filed under: Nature,Science by Orangemaster @ 3:13 pm
The island of Ameland off the Dutch coast is a popular tourist destination for the Dutch and many a foreigner. To get there you take a ferry boat, which sounds like a lot of fun, especially in the summer. I wouldn’t really know about the ferry, as on a 30 degree Celsius day a few years back, I had the chance to fly there and this was my view. Seeing the hordes of bunny rabbits scurry when a plane lands is hilarious and the runway has white plastic cans to ‘indicate’ where the runway is.
Mathilde Jansen researched the Ameland dialect for years and came to the following conclusions. ‘Amelands’ is mostly Frisian (an actual language, not a dialect) mixed with modern Dutch. Contrary to dialects on nearby Dutch islands, Amelands is also spoken by the kids, and not just the old folks. There are also East-West differences, only discernable to the real pros.
And about the old men: they still speak the most authentic version of the dialect, according to Jansen. She also says that previous research shows that men in general prefer to speak local dialect, while women opt for ‘regional and standard variants’.
Husein Mujagić survived the Omarska camp in the Bosnian war and now lives in the Dutch province of Limburg. To help him deal with his memories, he wrote a Dutch-Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian dictionary. This description didn’t come over as straightforward, so I will elaborate. Roughly, Bosnian is what people speak in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbian is spoken by Serbs and Croatian by Croatians. It’s way more complex, as Serbo-Croatian was long taught as one language, but that is slowly being spilt apart for cultural reasons. Yes, everybody understands each other, but there were reasons why the country split up into so many parts.
Mujagić was a math teacher in his own country and since he could not easily find work without speaking good Dutch, he worked as a janitor at a school. He’s always wanted to help children learn, and this two-part dictionary was his way of helping them do so, as he started with words his children would know. Both his sons are well-employed and are doing well, something Mujagić is very proud of.
After 10 years, his dictionary has more than 3,000 pages, but he only had some 100 copies printed for friends and family, Bosnian and Dutch. He alo reassures the Dutch that with his dictionary, they can make themselves understood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia, now all seperate countries.
Different but yet similar, last year we posted about a Dutch missionary in Malawi who wrote a English-Chichewa dictionary.
During one of his last days in office former Education Minister Halbe Zijlstra has saved the bachelor programme Minorities and Multilingualism: Into the Frisian Laboratory at the University of Groningen (RUG).
