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This paper outlines a regional and socio-demographic overview of languages and dialects used most often in and outside the home and on social media in the Netherlands based on a large-scale national representative survey by Statistics Netherlands conducted in 2019 among 7,652 people aged 15 years or older. 149 different languages/dialects were reported to be spoken at home, in other places or used for writing messages on social media. For 25 percent of the people surveyed, Dutch is not dominating at home: 8.2 percent speak another language than Dutch; 10.2 percent a regional language (Low Saxon 4.8 percent; Limburgish 3.4 percent, and Frisian 2.0 percent), and 5.3 percent dialect. The five most widely spoken other languages are English (1.6 percent), Turkish (0.9 percent), Moroccan Arabic/Berber (0.8 percent), Chinese/Mandarin (0.4 percent) and Polish (0.4 percent). 83 percent mostly use Dutch to write messages on social media with English following (35 percent). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introductory paper we discuss the expanding focus of lexical borrowing research over the past decade. Where this 'inevitable' outcome of language contact was originally predominantly addressed from a historical linguistic and lexicographic perspective, a broader range of linguistic traditions have recently been applied to the topic, each introducing their own questions, perspectives and methods. Below, we first present the main insights ensuing from a century of loanword research. Then, we introduce the viewpoints that characterize more recent work and the questions they foreground. In presenting the contributions to this special issue, we finally pay specific attention to the way the six papers add to the broader tendencies and innovations of current lexical borrowing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory paper outlines the different trends and movements that have in recent years led to a marked increase in the number of linguistic studies that combine a construction-based theoretical outlook on grammar with a dedicated interest in issues of synchronic and/or diachronic language variation. In addition, it gives an overview of the papers included in this thematic issue and links them with broader tendencies in the fields of cognitive linguistics and construction grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to encourage the interdisciplinary study of 'languageculture,' an approach to language and culture in which ideology, linguistic and cultural forms, as well as praxis are studied in relation to another (cf. Cornips et al 2012). It focuses on the construction of local and regional identities in Limburg and the linguistic political context of this Southern-Netherlands region where people are strongly aware of their linguistic distinctiveness. This contribution addresses the impact of globalization processes and mobility of speakers resulting in new and complex patterns of cultural and linguistic encounters. Since globalization does not only affect dominant areas, we need a new understanding of language and identities in peripheral areas in Europe (cf. Cornips et al. 2012). Although dialects are traditionally seen and analyzed as something that anchor people in a local context, speakers have become translocal i.e. people and the ways in which they speak are on the move (cf. Quist 2010). In this paper, in contrast to dialectology and dialect atlases based on modern linguistic theoretical insights like the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND), place is not conceived in objective, physical terms but instead as an emic, culturally defined category (Johnstone 2004). The process of place-making provides insight in how people categorize themselves and others through languagecultural practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the seventeenth century, the use of diminutive suffixes in Dutch was changing: the [kə] suffix was making way for the present-day Standard suffix [jə] - a transition which involved many hybrid suffixes - and the present-day substandard [i] also made its entrance. In this paper, the use of the different types of diminutives in private letters of the seventeenth-century Letters as Loot corpus will be examined for regional and social variation. This corpus consists of 595 letters - 545 of which are private - written by men and women of different social backgrounds. Its contents enable historical (socio)linguists to extensively examine seventeenth-century Dutch from the perspective of the language history 'from below' for the first time. However, examining the seventeenth-century diminutive suffixes is a difficult enterprise, for the various spelling forms in the letters frequently obscure the difference between the phonological types of suffixes [i] and [jə]. In order to shed new light on the history of Dutch diminutive suffixes, this paper also presents a method of analysis to categorise particular spelling forms as particular phonological types of suffixes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the field of historical sociolinguistics and gives a brief impression of the advances made during the last three decades. Furthermore, the relationship between local and international perspectives is stressed, while discussing the papers in the present Taal & Tongval issue. Finally, new research perspectives and the importance of using original archive sources come to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses variation and change in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Dutch, reviewing the importance of two types of explanation, the first focusing on dialect contact resulting from immigration as the locus of change, the second stressing the importance of writing conventions. Using a unique corpus of private letters from all social ranks, we discuss various phonological and morphosyntactic variables. We argue that ego-documents offer unique opportunities for historical (socio)linguistics, providing an unprecedented view of the vernacular. At the same time, writers did not consistently put their local dialect to paper. Writing practices such as morphological and syllabic orthographic principles caused the written code to move away from the vernacular. Supralocalization and graphemization, which are topics at the core of historical sociolinguistics, have to be taken into account by anyone interested in the communicative strategies which ordinary people used when they needed to write. At the same time, since supralocalization and graphemization may impede research on spoken language phenomena, they should also be addressed by researchers primarily interested in spoken language phenomena such as dialect contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes issue with the traditional (standard-oriented) account of codification in French commonly presented in histoires de la langue. In them the seventeenth-century grammarians are portrayed (a) as being engaged, in a detached and rational way, in a programme of intellectual and aesthetic perfection of the language, and (b) as being the country's linguistic legislators, working (teleologically) to design and set up a standard variety of French for the benefit of future generations. Our paper tries to show, first of all, that when we set the process of codification in French within its broad sociolinguistic context, we see the extent to which it was contingent on wider social concerns: codification did not happen in an atmosphere of serene detachment and rationality but was conditioned throughout by the social tensions endemic in a city the size of Paris. The paper then looks at the particular role of grammarians, notably Vaugelas, and notes that he himself makes no claim to be initiating or directing the process of linguistic change, but merely to be reflecting usage. While the grammarians give preference to salient variants possessing the highest social value (bon usage), it cannot be said that they actually set those values. These emerge from a consensus involving directly or indirectly the whole community. The development in the speech of a big city the size of Paris is traditionally seen in terms of top-down standardisation, but it is preferable to see it in terms of dialect-mixing and koineisation. What we see reflected in many of Vaugelas' Remarques is one of the processes involved in koineisation isolated by Peter Trudgill and labelled as 'reallocation of variants': the community tacitly accommodates linguistic variants left over from earlier instances of dialect-contact within its overall scheme of socio-stylistic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the reported attitudes of Flemish Sign Language (or VGT) signers with respect to Standard(ised) VGT and (varieties of) VGT in the media. Information extracted from interviews with and stimulus fragments shown to ten deaf VGT signers shows that they no longer consider standardization of VGT negatively. However, they do not value standard versus nonstandard varieties in terms of status versus solidarity traits (Giles & Coupland, 1991), but rather in terms of intelligibility versus identity. With respect to VGT on national television the quality of signing is considered more important than the variety used. Nevertheless, they do realize that the use of VGT in the media can have a significant impact on normativity and standardization of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a research conducted in West-Flanders on the attitudes towards tussentaal, a Flemish substandard language variety. This research aims to answer three questions pertaining to these attitudes. The fi rst question is what the impact of the variable 'age' is on the attitudes towards tussentaal. Although previous research has been conducted on attitudes towards this language variety, so far no attention has been paid to age-specifi c patterns in these attitudes. The second question is which tussentaal elements can account for certain positive or negative attitudes towards the variety as a whole. In order to answer this question, this research will focus on defi nite and indefi nite article forms that are typical for tussentaal with the aim of discovering how people perceive the tussentaal forms with respect to the standard forms. This fifi eld of research is relatively unexplored, which entails some methodological issues. As such, this part of the research can be considered a methodological experiment. The third and fi nal question is what impact the frequency of the tussentaal article forms has on the attitude of the informants. These three questions are discussed more elaborately in the fi rst part of this paper. The design of the research (the variables and the methodology) is explained in the second part. The fi nal part of this paper presents the results of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The southern Dutch variety has a traditional, so-called 'grammatical' gender system, in which pronouns agree in gender with their antecedent noun, which can be masculine, feminine or neuter. For most nouns, there is no apparent semantic motivation underlying gender assignment. However, this kind of grammatical system may be replaced with a system that makes use of semantically-motivated gender-marked pronouns, by a process termed 'resemantisation'. Certain elements of semantic gender systems are to be found in the language acquisition of southern children. This paper addresses the question to what extent these semantic tendencies in pronoun usage by children are indicative of an ongoing change in the southern pronominal gender system. Hence it focuses on pronominal gender usage of adults and adolescents as well as language acquiring children. The results reveal first, that even adolescents do not yet reach an adult-like proficiency in the grammatical gender system, and, second, that the influence of grammatical gender on pronominal reference gradually decreases from generation to generation. Though grammatical gender still stands strong, clear semantic patterns are observed, which indicate an ongoing process of resemantisation. The data for adolescents also suggest that the resemantisation process is pushed forward by language acquirers. In this paper the dynamics of this process will be discussed as well as how this fits in the typology of resemantisation pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the results of a perception study in Flanders are reported. 80 informants were subjected to a qualitative interview, to gain insight in the way Flemish language users judge on the situational appropriacy of several Dutch language varieties. The reported beliefs of the informants were compared to language ideological frameworks and they show an evolution in the standard language ideology (Milroy & Milroy, 1985), an ideology in which the standard language is considered to be the ideal and to be the only appropriate variety for formal and public situations. The informants still consider the standard language to be important and to be superior, but the variety according to them is not necessary for formal and public situations. Instead Tussentaal, lit. 'in-between language', has gained a position in the situational spectre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch aan-construction (e.g. Hij gaf een bos bloemen aan zijn vrouw 'He gave a bouquet to his wife'), the prepositional alternative for the double object construction (Hij gaf zijn vrouw een bos bloemen 'He gave his wife a bouquet'), is a post Middle Dutch innovation (i.e. after 1500 AD). The precise details of the rise of the aan-construction remain, however, understudied. It is for example unclear whether the construction really breaks through in the 17th century, as Weijnen and Gordijn (1970) argue on the basis of a small corpus of farces, and what its semantic range was in those early days. In this paper we try to shed more light on these issues. On the basis of a selfcompiled corpus of literary Dutch, we firstly show that the construction was not only already frequently attested in the language use in the 17th century, but also covered a remarkably wide semantic range at that time. Next, via a detailed comparison with data for the 20th century, we show that there have been interesting changes concerning the semantic evolution of the aanconstruction. The structural weight of a cluster of 'do'- and 'send'-verbs for example declines over time and at more general level there seems to be a trend towards more abstract uses of the aan-construction. A diachronic collostructional analysis (Hilpert, 2006) and Configural Frequency Analysis (von Eye, 2002) lends a statistical underpinning to our observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a corpus-based investigation into naming preferences in Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch for fourteen clothing terms. The study is a follow-up of Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999), in which soccer and clothing terminology from 1950, 1970 and 1990 was analysed as an indicator of standardisation in Dutch. This study extends the clothing corpus with new, comparable data from 2012 collected from magazines and shop windows. A profile-based measure of linguistic uniformity quantifies the differences in naming preferences across the 14 concepts between different varieties of Dutch. The results shed new light on the current linguistic situation in the Low Countries. The diachronic convergence between Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch found in Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999) seems to have come to a halt in present-day Dutch. On the other hand, the recent data confirm that the distance between the language in the lower register shop windows and the standard language in magazines remains largest in Belgian Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the results of a perception study in Flanders are reported. 80 informants were subjected to a qualitative interview, to gain insight in the way Flemish language users judge on the situational appropriacy of several Dutch language varieties. The reported beliefs of the informants were compared to language ideological frameworks and they show an evolution in the standard language ideology (Milroy & Milroy, 1985), an ideology in which the standard language is considered to be the ideal and to be the only appropriate variety for formal and public situations. The informants still consider the standard language to be important and to be superior, but the variety according to them is not necessary for formal and public situations. Instead Tussentaal, lit. 'in-between language', has gained a position in the situational spectre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an experimental answer to a question which has remained controversial since it was put on the agenda in the Romantic era: is beauty individually or communally determined? Applied to our research topic, accent variation in spoken Netherlandic Standard Dutch, this question should be rephrased as: is the perceived beauty of regional accents of Dutch in the eye of the beholder, or is it entrenched in the communal attitudes towards these varieties? Listener-judges rated the audio-taped speech of eight speakers representing four regional accents on traits pertaining to four evaluative dimensions, viz. integrity, dynamism, competence and status, but also on a separate scale pertaining to how beautiful or ugly the speech was found. The experiment reported here confirms prior experimental work which demonstrated that the beauty scale correlated with all the evaluative dimensions inherent in the ratings. This overarching and synthesizing function of the perceived beauty of speech suggests a communal rather than an individual origin of aesthetic perception in the field of language attitudes. We therefore concur with Van Bezooijen (2002) that beauty perceptions afford privileged and convenient access into language attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at mapping out and analyzing language variation and the underlying social structures of adolescents in a part of the province North Brabant, The Netherlands. It presents the findings of a study that was conducted in 2010 at two Dutch high schools, in a large college in the town of Uden and in a much smaller school in the peripheral village of Mill. Twelve video recordings were made of Brabantish boys and girls aged 15 and 16, who were having spontaneous conversations in their spare time at school. Additionally a written survey was made of social and cultural characteristics. We sketched profiles of our 38 informants, consisting of features such as locality, ethnicity, language use, language attitude, cultural behavior, and political opinion. We could form only one cluster of three informants that shared relating characteristics. Diversity and variability seems to reach such a degree that stereotypes are not or hardly applicable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will investigate the relation between regiolect formation and the emergence of tussentaal ('interlanguage') in Flanders. More in particular, we will try to find out to what extent tussentaal is the product of regiolect formation as defined by Hoppenbrouwers (1990) and Hinskens (1993, 1996). In all Flemish regions a supra-regional interlanguage is gaining ground, with an indisputable Brabantic character. As for the intra-regional communication, the situation is different in the three regions under consideration. In the Brabantic region the traditional dialects are on the decline, except for the Antwerp city dialect, which - more than any other dialect - contributes to the formation of the Brabantic regiolect. In the West-Flemish region the traditional dialects are still fairly vital, but nevertheless a West-Flemish regiolect seems to be emerging too. In the East-Flemish region people tend to switch directly from the traditional dialects to the interlanguage. There seems to be no such thing as an East-Flemish regiolect. This regiospecific dynamics between dialect, regiolect (if any) and interlanguage makes for a very complex situation of language variation in Flanders today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On February, 16, 2006 , the website PLAntennamen in de Nederlandse Dialecten was launched ('plant names in the Dutch dialects', or PLAND), which contains over 300.000 tokens, and which is potentially the biggest database of its kind worldwide. This paper provides a description of the history of PLAND, its contents and the interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the division of dialect areas in the Dutch province North-Brabant, as proposed by Weijnen, predominantly in his dissertation (1937). The spread of dialect phenomena as described in more recent research results, such as Woordenboek van de Brabantse Dialecten ('Dictionary of the Brabantic Dialects') or Morphology Atlas of Dutch Dialects, is compared to the isoglosses Weijnen has drawn. Special attention is given to three dialect areas Weijnen has mentioned as 'non-Brabantic'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Weijnen's most important and most representative contributions to Dutch dialectology. Weijnen's scientific work is marked by combining an overall synthetic motivation and a stringently analytical approach. This combination resulted in both stratigraphic studies of the dialect lexicon and innovative insights in the classifi cation of the Dutch dialects. Weijnen succeeded in uniting bundles of isoglosses resulting from geographical studies on words and sounds and subjective, perception based ratings of dialect speakers on linguistics distances between dialects. His work is strikingly consistent, from his dissertation onwards (1937), along his opus magnum, Nederlandse Dialectkunde (1958 en 1966), and up to and including his 1999 study on the old lexical layers in the south-central dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch dialectologist Weijnen was a central figure in the instigation and development of the Atlas Linguarum Europae (ALE). This paper discusses the role of comparative dialect syntax in Weijnen's work and the ALE and compares this with modern comparative dialect syntax research. One main conclusion is that collecting comparative dialect syntax data on a large scale requires a theoretical perspective to guide and restrict the descriptive questions to be asked. A second main conclusion is that modern technological developments can make large comparative dialect syntactic data sets accessible to the research community. Consequently, it becomes possible to test hypothesized correlations quantitatively. A precondition for such an enhancement of the empirical basis of comparative syntactic research is of course extensive and intensive systematic data collection in as many language areas as possible. Most of this work still has to begin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, the paper legacy of Toon Weijnen, as stored and made digitally searchable in the library and archives of the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, is described. Weijnen's library is a refl ection of the entire state of Dutch dialectology until the fi nal decade of last century. His scientifi c correspondence includes almost 2000 letters from the period 1935-2006 and around 500 other manuscripts. But above all this, his students are the scientifi c legacy of Toon Weijnen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]