Dutch linguistics and the general audience

Abstract

Skimming through old issues of Dutch newspapers may sometimes provide for surprises: linguistics seems to have been taken very serious as an academic discipline in the period before the Second World War. One of the precursors of the Algemene Vereniging voor Taalwetenschap (General Society of Linguistics), publisher of this volume, was the Phonologische Werkgemeenschap (Phonological Workshop), a group of Dutch linguists that was mostly active in the 1930s and met regularly to discuss topical issues in one of the hottest new subfields at the time, the pinnacle of European structuralism: phonology (Daalder 2010). The surprise is that in some of the larger newspapers seem to have paid attention to the meetings of the Workshop. For instance, 20 members met on 18 April 1940, and the prestigious newspaper N.R.C. devoted a report to this meeting nine days later (all translations are mine):