Prestige (either overt and conservative, or latent and modern, as in modern Belgian Standard Dutch) seems not the sole force molding and preserving coherence in Europe's standard (and co-occuring non-standard) language varieties. The growth of zero prestige variants in standard language contexts indicates the presence of a “perceptual harmony” measure, i.e. an implicit speaker-hearer consensus on how much socially relevant variability a particular context may involve or permit.