Chapter 3 The Dutch Situation - LOT publications

The Dutch Situation
The issue will be revisited in Chapters 5 and 6, where the corpus data is presented
and discussed. This masculinization has opened the doors to a movement in the
opposite direction, viz. the promotion of the feminine pronoun to a marker of high
style. For speakers from the north of the Dutch language area, it reflects the
command of a distinction only marginally alive in the spoken language, but
associated with educated writing. Thus, the feminine is the prime candidate for
hypercorrect language use.
Indeed, in some registers the feminine is overused to such an extent that it has
attracted public attention. The popular term “haar-ziekte” (‘haar-disease’) was
coined to describe the proliferation of the full-form feminine possessive haar ‘her’
in unexpected places. This extensive use of haar can be attributed to language
history on the one hand, on the other to hypercorrection and opportunism.
The haar in question is used mainly in journalistic and administrative writing, and it
appears preferably with collectives such as partij ‘party’ or volk ‘people’.
Sometimes the antecedent is a true historical feminine, such as regering
‘government’, but in many cases it is not. Haar is occasionally used for historical
masculines such as staat ‘state’, and in fact, it is quite often found in combination
with neuter nouns. These are the cases against which the protest in the media is
directed, and the relevant sentences are smiled at or frowned upon by native
speakers of Dutch. Two examples are given under (13).
(13) a) dat het Nederlandse volk haar soevereiniteit terug krijgt
that DEF.N Dutch people(N) POSS.F sovereignty back gets
‘that the Dutch people regains its sovereignty’
(http://presscenter.nl/Message/default.asp?NewsID=763&CatID=100)
b) Het ijshockey in Nederland probeert alles
DEF.N ice_hockey(N) in the_Netherlands tries everything
om haar imago te verbeteren
in_order POSS.F image to improve
‘The ice hockey in the Netherlands is trying everything in
order to improve its image’
(De Volkskrant 05 January 2004)
The link to collectives probably has a historical source. In earlier Dutch, the form
haar was used as a plural possessive form for all three genders (this place in the
paradigm is now occupied by hun ‘their’) (Van der Sijs 2004: 448). This usage is
still reported in the grammar of Ten Kate (Ten Kate, Noordegraaf and Van der Wal
2001 [1723] I: 471). In Middle Dutch, many collective nouns, especially derived
words, had feminine gender. Since collectives are often pronominalized by plural
pronouns, a reinterpretation from a plural to a feminine pronoun is a likely path of
development.
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