This article aims to contribute to the study of Belgian Dutch as an immigrant language in North America. It does so with the specific hypothesis that the pre-migration sociolinguistic and language political context in migrants’ home countries plays an important role, in particular with regard to… read more
Contrary to the fixed language norms of Northern (“Hollandic”) Dutch, Southern (“Flemish”) Dutch in the eighteenth and nineteenth century is claimed to have been nothing more than a collection of mutually unintelligible and Frenchified dialects. Such discourses of Southern linguistic chaos lie at… read more
This introductory article to the special issue on the historical sociolinguistics of spelling sketches an overview of the current interest in the field for the sociopolitical nature of the written language. Spelling is understood as a powerful tool for sociopolitical mobilization and thus becomes… read more
Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a distinct Southern Dutch linguistic identity emerged in the region now known as Flanders, and spelling features are at the heart of this developing linguistic autonomy. By analyzing eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century normative and… read more
This chapter discusses norms and usage in 19th-century Southern Dutch. After a brief sociohistorical sketch, we provide an overview of the Southern normative tradition, discussing its roots in the 18th century and its further development in the early 19th century. Next, we introduce three case… read more
The present contribution deals with synchronic variation in Dutch past tense regularization, focusing on cognitive and geolinguistic aspects of the phenomenon. Experimental data are presented from a production task and a series of acceptability judgments, carried out among a group of 240 native… read more
The reunion of the Northern and Southern Low Countries under William I (1814–1830) marked the beginning of a renewed and intensified linguistic contact between the North and the South of the Dutch linguistic area. Two writing traditions usually regarded as different came into close contact, giving… read more
This study investigates the phenomenon of weakening or regularization in Dutch verb morphology synchronically: how often do forms such as kiesde 'choosed' or graafde 'digged' occur, how acceptable are they, and what factors influence the production of weakified rather than strong forms? Based on… read more