| Since World War II, problems in the Belgian political landscape have increasingly been formulated as conflicts between the two main language groups, and especially since the seventies more political autonomy of language groups on the basis of the territoriality principle has been the preferred method to deal with ‘cultural differences’ and the resulting ‘conflicts’. In a 1998 report of the Council of Europe, the rapporteur Columberg questions these Belgian solutions. This resulted in a crucial debate in which the Flemish politicians and press explicitly defended the territoriality principle under attack.; This study aims to reveal dominant language ideologies underlying this Belgian-European language-policy debate. It explores the majority perspective on societal multilingualism, their attitudes and beliefs about language-group identities, and how these manifest themselves in a corpus of Flemish newspaper articles. I look at the level of intertextual relations between the Columberg report and the media reporting, at the level of the more explicit patterns of argumentation, at the level of categorization and the conceptual framework by making an inventory of the linguistic choices made at the word level, and at the intertextual relations in terms of which voices are accessed in the media reporting and how they are recontextualized. The findings in the inter- and intra-textual analysis of the Columberg corpus were found to be coherent with other media sources.; This linguistic-pragmatic analysis of the data reveals that the reporting on this Belgian language-policy issue is composed of key words, language patterns and thematic strands that keep recurring, and these recycling processes are ways of what Mercer (2000: 175) calls “interthinking”, “jointly creating knowledge and understanding” (Mercer 2000: 15), from which people develop “shared, coherent lines of thought” (Mercer 2000: 175), or ideologies. I argue, in conclusion, that a majority in Flanders perceive a direct ideological link between a language and a people, and between a language group and political autonomy, because this would further the integration of a people and render state management and administration more efficient. The underlying ideological presupposition that dominates the mainstream public discourse in the Columberg debate is one of linguistic homogeneity, i.e. the cohabitation of different language groups is perceived as problematic. |
