ABSTRACT
In the Netherlands, there has been, since the 16th century, a long tradition of foreign language education, especially in French, which was the second “mother tongue” of the Dutch upper classes in the 18th century. The law of 1863 introduced the compulsory teaching of German, French and English in secondary school and consequently the law of 1876 permitted the creation of chairs of philology of modern languages at the Dutch University. This was, partly, in order to educate on an academic level the future foreign language teachers. But it took 40 years to get recognition for the academic dimension of the discipline by introducing specific university degrees through the Academic Statute in 1921. At the University of Groningen, Barend Sijmons and Anton G. van Hamel, the founders of philology, promoted, through their Chair (1881, 1884), their discipline as a science with distinct social relevance. Modern language education was in fact serving both a humanist and a liberal ideology, and was a political issue answering the needs of the Bourgeoisie with her commercial purpose. Directly or indirectly, the international context influenced the development of philology as an academic discipline, as philologists were acting as ‘passeurs culturels’ (‘cultural transfer agents’).
