Being a journalist in a multilingual country: Representations of Dutch among Belgian French-speaking journalists

Abstract

In this paper, we examine how the francophone TV audience is introduced to the Flemish community and its language through daily news broadcasts. More specifically, our research looks at how the Dutch language is used when francophone journalists prepare and produce their reports – during all stages of the process –, up until the actual broadcast. We therefore conducted 15 qualitative interviews with TV news journalists employed by the Belgian French-speaking public broadcaster. The interviews were organized around eight topics, e.g. the place of Dutch in the newsroom and the languages chosen during interactions with Dutch-speaking interviewees. From a discursive point of view, we focused on the selected lexical terms and rhetorical tropes (the various uses of the litotes, in particular) to unpack the journalists’ practices, in relation to their representations of Dutch. Our study provides notable insights into their representation of the differences between French- and Dutch-speaking Belgians as a generational issue, their tendency to assess their proficiency in Dutch measured against bilingualism, as well as their wish to beat the cliché of “the unilingual French-speaker”. These observations are coupled with criteria which explain why French might be preferred in the end: the TV audience’s comfort, general intelligibility and subtitling constraints.

Language perceptions and use among (TV) journalists in multilingual Belgium: how pragmatic realities affect the idealized benchmark of bilingualism

“…Our previous studies (Bouko et al, 2018;Standaert et al, 2020) revealed that Frenchspeaking reporters tend to admire bilingualism and frame it in an ideal way, in line with Bloomfield's idealized approach of 'the native-like control of two languages' (Bloomfield, 1933: 56). Although both French-and Dutch-speaking reporters admire bilingualism, claim that every Belgian should strive to be able to speak both most important official languages, and most feel embarrassed for their language levels, initiatives to make the newsroom more bilingual do not appear to be a reality.…”

“…In previous research on journalistic routines in the RTBF newsroom, the leading Belgian francophone TV broadcaster, we focused on French-speaking journalists’ representations and use of Dutch when covering a news story in Flanders, or when interviewing a (native) Dutch speaker (Bouko et al, 2018; Standaert et al, 2020) In this article, we compare these findings to those in the newsroom of the Flemish public broadcaster Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroep (VRT). An attempt is made at answering how Belgian TV reporters from either side of the language barrier regard the other linguistic community and its language through daily news broadcasts.…”