On Top of Maslow

Manifesto for the Abolishment of Dutch

There has lately been some discussion on the speaking of English at Dutch universities (e.g. in NRC Handelsblad). Opponents feared, first, that the level of education would decrease because many professors were not fluent enough in this language and, second, that it would encourage a division between a highly educated, English speaking, wealthy elite and a lower educated, Dutch speaking, relatively poor rest of the country. Proponents of English at universities put forward that international dialogue is impossible in Dutch and that, indeed, the language best approximating a lingua franca of the academic, business and cultural world is English. Both are right of course.

The easiest way to solve this dilemma is to completely and utterly abolish Dutch as the prime official language in the Netherlands. Let Dutch be an optional course in high school, just for the historically interested.

Some immediate advantages would include a) cost savings for taking part in a large international community of people speaking English, thus lowering the cost of translation per person and allowing for greater cultural diversity (for example: each year about 40 books are translated into English for every 1 translated into Dutch, and don’t get me started on books actually published in these languages), and b) a more inclusive attitude towards what is going on in the world, because we can now understand them better and – even more encouraging – the rest of the world can now understand us and witness our brilliant ideas.

The objection to this proposal that is perhaps most difficult to counter is a sense of cultural pride and auto-identification with the language you have grown up with. I have two things to say to this: first, I have experienced that cultural auto-identification depends on more than just language; indeed, it is very resilient. Do you seriously think that we would abandon, together with the language, our cheese, polders, bluntness, and pragmatic problem-solving attitude? Second, multiple identities can co-exist within one person, and it is about time that we learned to covet our global identity along with our Dutch (and Moroccan/Turkish/Amsterdam/Achterhoek/family/etc) one. We are living in a time when it is increasingly evident that the global eco(nomic) system is connected in many ways that tie us to people from all over the globe in important ways. The loss of a couple of relatively small languages is incomparable to the possible gain of an increased global consciousness.

Lastly, in the process of continuing globalisation, Dutch will not survive anyway. It is inevitable. (What we will continue seeing, I have been told by linguists, are increasing local dialects of the lingua franca.) So why not once again let the Netherlands be a guiding country in international development and make the best of the inevitable? I hereby call on all people to contribute to a list of Dutch words for which there is not yet an adequate English translation and propose your own new word for it, so that we can add these to the English dictionary. Gidsland is without doubt the first word I would like to contribute to the list.

You can send your words to marten at ontopofmaslow dot org