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Category Archives: Dutch prescriptivism
“Een boek vol taalfouten” – an excellent usage guide for Dutch
Looking for Dutch usage guides in the context of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project has not been easy or productive. Asking around didn’t produce any titles, nor did I come across any in bookshops which I visited regularly across the … Continue reading
Prescriptivism in a Dutch news item
Last night on the 8 o’clock news: a new gadget was introduced that warned users if a stalker would come too close. A woman was interviewed anonymously about the advantages of wearing such a gadget, saying how happy she was … Continue reading
Posted in Dutch prescriptivism, usage features
Tagged dialect, Dutch grammar, hun/zij, prescriptivism, subject hun
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Linguistic Landscaping in Bookshops (4)
It occurred to me that what I’m doing with this project is similar to what Yorick van Norden did for his book The Platenkast van Paul McCartney (“Paul McCartney’s record collection”) which came out earlier this year. Except that my … Continue reading
Linguistic Landscaping in Bookshops (3)
I had to be in Leiden for a social event this week, so decided to go a little earlier and visit as many of the bookshops in the city centre as I could manage. Three of them this time, all … Continue reading
Linguistic Landscaping in Bookshops (2)
So far, I’ve got data from four bookshops, one in the UK (Foyles – London), two in The Netherlands (De Vries van Stockum – The Hague; Boekhandel Broekhuis – Almelo) and one in Germany (Dussmann – Berlin). On the start … Continue reading
Just out: this semester’s last Language Law and Order podcast
Great news: one more of our podcasts in the Language Law and Order series is out, as the last one before the summer. This time, we’re interviewing Hielke Vriesendorp on his research in Inclusive Dutch: Between Norm and Variation. Have … Continue reading
Hun or hen? A Dutch shibboleth hitting the news
Hun and hen: these are third person plural pronouns in Dutch, but the distinction – hun for indirect object and hen for direct object – is hard to remember (for me it definitely is). And anyway, the distinction was only … Continue reading
Posted in Dutch prescriptivism, news, usage features
Tagged Dutch prescriptivism, Dutch usage advice, hun/hen, shibboleths
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Singular ‘they’ in Dutch?
“Will everyone put down their phone?” is quite common in English today. It has been around as a construction since at least the 14th century, developed into quite a controversial feature in the language, but as our Usage poll #10 … Continue reading
Posted in Dutch prescriptivism, news, usage features
Tagged Dutch prescriptivism, singular they
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Comparative prescriptivism
When I gave a workshop on usage guides and old usage problems for TeamWork earlier this year, Marcel Lemmens, one of the organisers, presented me with a copy of his recently published writing manual called Als je BGRPT wat ik … Continue reading
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