Category Archives: news

Hun or hen? A Dutch shibboleth hitting the news

Posted on September 16, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

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 | Leave a comment

Congratulations, Dr Stenton!

Posted on September 4, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

Yesterday, Adrian Stenton obtained his PhD degree from the University of Leiden. His thesis is called These Kind of Words: Number agreement in the species noun phrase in International Academic English. The thesis was published Open Access by LOT, and … Continue reading →

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Vernacular norms (guest post by Joan Beal)

Posted on August 8, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

August 1 is Yorkshire day and, right on cue, a link to a BBC news item about Yorkshire dialect arrived in a WhatsApp message from my daughter Alice, who lives in Sheffield: New signs drawn up after council apostrophe error. … Continue reading →

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HUGE 2.0, or …?

Posted on July 11, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

Filled with happy academic memories of the 7th Prescriptivism Conference organised by Linda Pillière and her team at the University of Aix Marseille towards the end of last month! The papers were all very interesting, the plenarists (Nuria Yañez-Bouza, Jane … Continue reading →

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Out now – another very interesting book on prescriptivism

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

Congratulations, editors Nuria Yañez-Bouza, María Esther Rodríguez-Gil and Javier Pérez-Guerra! You did a great job editing and publishing the proceedings of the 6th Prescriptivism conference held at Vigo in 2021. The book can now be ordered from Multilingual Matters, on … Continue reading →

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Singular ‘they’ in Dutch?

Posted on January 22, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

“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 →

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Soon coming out

Posted on November 30, 2023 by Ingrid Tieken

New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research, edited by Nuria Yáñez‐Bouza, María E. Rodríguez‐Gil and Javier Pérez‐Guerra, will by published by Multilingual Matters in the Spring. Congratulations, editors! Looking forward to seeing the book in print soon! Further details here.

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7th Prescriptivism conference

Posted on August 28, 2023 by Ingrid Tieken

The seventh edition of this wonderful conference series will take place from 26 to 28 June 2024 in Aix en Provence, in France. Plenary speakers will be Ian Cushing (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK), Jane Hodson (University of Sheffield, UK) and … Continue reading →

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The Routledge prescriptivism handbook

Posted on June 14, 2023 by Ingrid Tieken

My copy has arrived, and I’m immensely pleased to be holding it in my hands at last! Some figures: 1 book 3 editors, 2 members of the editorial board 3 parts, 26 papers plus 1 introduction and 1 afterword 45 … Continue reading →