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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton January 14, 2011

Chaos and standards: Orthography in the Southern Netherlands (1720–1830)

  • Gijsbert Rutten and Rik Vosters
From the journal Multilingua

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.


Address for correspondence: Gijsbert Rutten, Universiteit Leiden, LUCL/Nederlands, Van Wijkplaats 4, Postbus 9515, NL – 2300 RA Leiden. e-mail:
Address for correspondence: Rik Vosters, Center for Linguistic Research, Department of Linguistics and Literature, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussel (BE). e-mail: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~rvosters/

Published Online: 2011-01-14
Published in Print: 2010-November

© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York

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