ELL: Re: Flemish

[William J Poser]

If I'm not mistaken there is a disparity between the official standard
for Flemish and the actual standard. That is, the position of the Belgian
government, at least in the past 15 or 20 years, has been that Flemish
is the same thing as Dutch. They even re-named it - the language is supposed
to be called "nederlands", not "vlaams". So, as I understand it, in theory
written standard Flemish should be the same as written standard Dutch.

However, in practice, there are some differences between Flemish and Dutch
that are always maintained, even by educated "standard" speakers. For example,
I don't think that any Flemish speaker would consider it proper to say
"mannetje" for "boy" rather than "mannika", even though standard Dutch
uses -tje for the diminutive rather than -ka. Is this not so? Perhaps
a Flemish expert could comment.

As a little aside on language attitudes, at one point the admissions
tickets for the Plantin Museum (the famous old print shop) said in
French "Ministry of Education and National Culture" but in Flemish
"Ministry of Education and Dutch Culture".

Bill Poser

--
Bill Poser, Visiting Professor, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/
billposer at alum.mit.edu
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