…in order to cement the people of what is now the Nederland as a separate entity from German(y)?
Probably the Eighty Years’ War as a whole.
AFAIK the people in the Low Countries in the 1500s didn’t feel fundamentally different from what is now Germany. There were simply lots of small countries ruled by dukes, bishops etcetera, some independent, some (by inheritance and conquest) ruled from afar. The Low Countries just happened to be ruled by ‘the Spanish’ (i.e. Habsburg, who at the time had their center in Spain), and became frustrated by the heavy-handed approach to government. So they revolted, and because they couldn’t find a suitable king, they were forced to resort to self-government. The Seven provinces were still quite independent, and AFAIK didn’t feel all culturally separate from their German counterparts, particularly in the east.
Napoleon unified the country, and in the 19th century there was a broad movement (like everywhere in Europe) to find a Dutch essence, which forged some kind of Dutch identity against other countries. But it was still felt that Dutch and German were quite close.
WW II caused the definitive separation between Dutch and Germany. Older generations that were raised before WW II were much more inclined to read German, while afterwards America was more dominant in the perception.
However, these events were prefigured by centuries of growing identity. The Dutch language was already being shaped into its own language in the 16th-17th century, witness unique words like ‘wiskunde’ for mathematics (we can blame Stevin for that). But that kind of Dutch used to be primarily present in Holland; the other provinces had (and still have) their own local dialects (or languages) that in the east are much closer to German. At least a few decades ago the local population there still was very much oriented to Germany and spoke the same dialect as the people just across the border.
The development of Dutch language and ‘culture’ is as much an erasure of more local identity by the hegemony of Holland.
This may be as good a place as any to ask a question I have long wondered about. Is Plattdeutsch closer to Dutch or to Hochdeutsch? Where does Frisian fit in to this?
I wouldn’t be able to say to which language Plattdeutsch is closer; from what I gather it is somewhere in between (appears like a mixture, albeit spoken in a way that is neither Dutch nor German). Indeed this is the dialect I implicitly refered to.
Frisian is an entirely distinct language that to me gives the impression of influences of Dutch and Scandinavian languages. Lots of words can be recognised as similar to their counterparts in those other languages, with a different pronunciation. It feels a bit like deciphering Shakespearian English or Scottish (which also have a fair number of recognisable words).
Purely anecdotal: on my first school exchange trip to Germany (Hamburg), my hosts watched a TV relay of a local theatre’s play in Plattdeutsch, and I found I could more or less follow it by thinking of the actors as folk with a North-East of England accent trying to speak regular German.
Much later when I was learning some Dutch, it helped to have German - once you get used to Dutch equivalents of a lot of German words and parts of words and general grammatical rules, there’s a lot similar - but a lot of difference. I once got into a muddle in Germany using the Dutch word for postage stamps instead of the German, which is completely different.
From Wikipedia:
One rhyme that is sometimes used to demonstrate the palpable similarity between Frisian and English is “Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries”, which does not sound very different from “Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk”.
I’ve been seeing this thread since it appeared and wondering who / how we’d come up w an answer. It seemed to me to be a toughy.
Now a few days later I get time to read it and see that @Tusculan & @Alessan had nailed it within a couple hours.
The Dope is amazing.
Thank you both!
Surely the time they ate their prime minister has to be on the list…