Chaos and standards: Orthography in the Southern Netherlands (1720–1830)
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Gijsbert Rutten
Abstract
This paper discusses metalinguistic discourse and orthographical practice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the southern Netherlands (‘Flanders’). Whereas a lot is known about Dutch language standardization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what happened after that, especially in the southern territories, is still partly uncharted territory. This contribution will examine and challenge the myths of language decline and linguistic chaos that are often associated with eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Flanders. The authors show that there was a vivid and coherent normative tradition, especially on the level of orthography, and that even a case of apparent orthographical disorder, such as the so-called accent spelling, can be counted as an instance of language standardization in the eighteenth-century southern Netherlands.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Imbodela zamakhumsha – Reflections on standardization and destandardization
- Lambs to the slaughter? Young francophones and the role of English in Quebec today
- Can parallelingualism save Norwegian from extinction?
- Using folk songs as a source for dialect change? The pervasive effects of attitudes
- Language contact and language conflict in autochthonous language minority settings in the EU: A preliminary round-up of guiding principles and research desiderata
- Is there a European language history?
- Language variation, language change and perceptual dialectology
- Will Dutch become Flemish? Autonomous developments in Belgian Dutch
- Chaos and standards: Orthography in the Southern Netherlands (1720–1830)
- Book reviews
- Publications received
- Contents Multilingua Volume 29 (2010)
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Imbodela zamakhumsha – Reflections on standardization and destandardization
- Lambs to the slaughter? Young francophones and the role of English in Quebec today
- Can parallelingualism save Norwegian from extinction?
- Using folk songs as a source for dialect change? The pervasive effects of attitudes
- Language contact and language conflict in autochthonous language minority settings in the EU: A preliminary round-up of guiding principles and research desiderata
- Is there a European language history?
- Language variation, language change and perceptual dialectology
- Will Dutch become Flemish? Autonomous developments in Belgian Dutch
- Chaos and standards: Orthography in the Southern Netherlands (1720–1830)
- Book reviews
- Publications received
- Contents Multilingua Volume 29 (2010)
