We decided to write about the development of languages, specifically the Dutch and English language. First we just wanted to do the English language, but we have not done a bilingual course for nothing. We are bilingual and so is our report.
Both of us like language and reading so we really liked the idea of doing something with language in our report. After discussions with our supervisor and thinking about possible subjects about language ourselves we went with the development of language. It was Mrs. Lammerts who came up with the idea in one of our discussions and we liked it so much we decided to work it out.
The main question we came up with is “What are the main differences between the development of the English language and the Dutch language?”. To get to the answer we are going to cover the following things in this report: “What is language?”, the development of the English language, the development of the Dutch language and the differences between their developments.
We did not want our research to exist only out of researching the development, but also of something else. Which is why we decided to make a questionnaire. Since we are TTO students ourselves, we were really interested if there was a difference between TTO students and regular students when it came to recognising an old Dutch and an old English text. We think the TTO students will recognise the old English text more easily than the regular students. We made a questionnaire with one old Dutch text, one old English text, one recent Dutch text and one recent English text. We decided we wanted the questionnaire to be filled out by the fourth class, because they know enough to understand a lot of English, but do not know as much as the higher classes.
Before all of this there will be first be a summary to give an expression about the outcome of our research.
We have a good friendship which made it nicer to work on this report. We always had fun working together and trying to make something of our work. Next to working we also laughed a lot and that’s an important part of it all too, the relationship between the writers of the report.
Language is a phenomenon only humans possess and use a device for communication. It dates back thousands and thousands of years ago, but there’s only one piece of evidence that language existed before it was written down 5,300 years ago. Nowadays almost all languages are being written down next to being spoken. Today, there are 6,900 languages which are divided into one 90 language families which include Germanic and Roman. All languages are believed to have originated from one single languages called the proto-language.
Old English has endured many changes because of all the different invasion it had to face, but eventually a Standard Written English was created. However, in the Middle English period this Standard Written English was disestablished. During this period people mostly wrote without any structure in their written work. But at the end of this period a new Written Standard was on the rise, the Modern Standard English. Many centuries later, due to technology and social media, a separate language seems to be emerging. A language consisting of abbreviations and emoji’s.
As expected there was a lot less information on the development of the Dutch language than of the English language, because Dutch is not a world language. Dutch people would probably be able to find some similarities in all of the texts used as long as they know what they are reading is Dutch. You can see a clear development going from Old Dutch to Middle Dutch to New Dutch. With every few hundred years it starts to look more and more like the Dutch we know nowadays.
People use a lot of abbreviations in social media nowadays, they make abbreviations out of almost everything. Dutch people use a lot of English abbreviations next to the Dutch abbreviations they use.
The results of questionnaire were not as expected. A lot of results are the other way around: more regular students had the right answer and not the TTO students. This might be because the TTO students are so focused on recent English that they cannot see modifications of words they know from recent English.
We can conclude that English has had more development than Dutch.