Practice and Functions of French as a Second Language in a Dutch Patrician Family: The van Hogendorp Family (eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries)

Abstract

In seventeenth and eighteenth-century Holland, French was increasingly used as a second language, not only by diplomats, in international business and in the Republic of Letters, but also as a distinguishing factor in social life. In this article this is demonstrated on the basis of numerous documents, partly unpublished, preserved in the archives of the van Hogendorp family. These enable us to give a bird's eye view of the ways in which French was used by successive generations of this patrician family. We discuss its relation to the Dutch language and show how this use of a foreign language develops: the first generation's bilingualism becomes plurilingualism in the later ones. We also interpret this bilingualism and plurilingualism in the context of contemporary politics, without neglecting the gender perspective, since many of the documents of this family were written by women. Keywords: bilingualism, correspondence, education in French, egodocuments, French as second language, Low Countries, multilingualism, van Hogendorp family In a recent study on multilingualism in the United Provinces in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Willem Frijhoff underlines the particular place that French gradually occupied.1 Of course, the States General, that is to say the government of the Republic of the Seven Provinces which was born in 1579, adopted Dutch for official texts, and the translation of the Bible they commissioned (published in 1637 as States Translation or States Bible) marks a new step in the standardization of Dutch and its recognition as the national language. Besides, the presence of other languages on the territory of the Republic can be observed too, languages such as the Frisian spoken in the province of Frisia (Friesland), Latin used in scholarly communication and in religious controversy. The knowledge of modern languages (French, English, German, and to a lesser extent Italian and Spanish) proved essential for commercial relations with the countries where these languages were spoken but also on account of the presence of groups originating from these countries, on the soil of the Republic.

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