LETTER FROM BENELUX

Historian and lecturer at the Open Universiteit in Heerlen, Limburg, Martijn van der Burg is adamant that "a quiet but worrying linguistic catastrophe" is looming in the Netherlands. The teaching of the French language is particularly at risk, he said, in a country where only an elite, generally quite advanced in age, still regularly uses the language of Voltaire. Major universities such as Leiden, Amsterdam, Nijmegen and Groningen are struggling to maintain a program of French study, even when this means including it in "European languages and cultures" programs. In Utrecht, at the end of October, the academic authorities even announced their intention to phase out their Franse taal en cultuur – "French language and culture" – program from 2026.

On November 1, Platform Frans, a network of over 1000 Dutch experts in the French language and culture field, published an appeal, for the preservation of French language learning at all levels of education. In this appeal, seven prominent figures from the country's leading educational establishments promoted maintaining courses in "a neighboring language spoken the world over" and safeguarding close links with "a French-speaking society that is literally our own." Not to mention, they stressed, that "students of French develop a broader vision of the world than those who master only Dutch and English."

At this stage, however, the appeal to the dean of Utrecht University to preserve his institution's Frans taal en cultuur program is unlikely to be heeded. The entire Dutch academic world is in shock following announcement of a government plan to save €1 billion in the field of education, research and innovation. A demonstration scheduled for Thursday, November 14, in Utrecht was expected to bring together thousands of participants, but was cancelled at the last minute for fear of further outbursts following violent incidents in Amsterdam a week earlier, at the end of the match between Ajax Amsterdam and sraeli team Maccabi Tel-Aviv.

Faced with what Marileen Dogterom, president of the Royal Academy of Sciences, called "the perfect storm" unleashed by the austerity plan of the far-right government, universities are being forced to prepare plans for redundancies and the abolition of courses. Languages are also all the more in the crosshairs as a project is also underway to "Netherland-ize" certain courses currently taught in English. The aim is twofold: restoring the national language to its rightful place, as called for by populist parties, and limiting the influx of foreign students, whose numbers rose steadily between 2015 and 2023. In the last academic year, however, the number of foreign students fell from 18,600 to 17,400.

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