First buttembly language encountershow to get started 566

Giles Todd

As the person who pointed that out, let me say that I tend to agree with you!

The thing about Vlaams is that it is spoken in a country that also has Standaardnederlands ("Standard Dutch", formerly called ABN -- "Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands", "general cultivated Dutch") as an official language, a country that is a paid up charter member of the Nederlandse Taalunie (the "Dutch Language Union", the cooperative body through which the Netherlands and Belgium -- and now also Suriname -- manage to keep their official language the same or at least agree to mutually accept both countries' preferences where they differ). And of course Belgium is geographically adjacent to the Netherlands, and the linguistic boundary doesn't coincide with the political border: the language spoken in the south of the Netherlands is said closer to Belgium varieties than to what is spoken north of the rivers in the Netherlands. (Even I can hear this in some features, such as whether final -n is pronounced or dropped). South Africa had no such restraining forces at work once it decided -- on political grounds -- to go its own way with the language and no longer to consider standard Dutch as normative in any way.

-- Roland HutchinsonÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWillÊplayÊviolaÊdaÊgambaÊforÊfood.

NB mail to my.spamtrap at verizon.net is heavily filtered to remove spam.ÊÊIfÊyourÊmessageÊlooksÊlikeÊspamÊIÊmayÊnotÊseeÊit.