Open AccessWat dragen we vandaag: een hemd met blazer of een shirt met jasje?
Author(s) -
Jocelyne Daems,
Kris Heylen,
Dirk Geeraerts
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
taal en tongval
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2215-1214
pISSN - 0039-8691
DOI - 10.5117/tet2015.2.daem
Subject(s) - clothing , terminology , divergence (linguistics) , register (sociolinguistics) , linguistics , convergence (economics) , history , advertising , business , philosophy , archaeology , economics , economic growth
What to wear today: een hemd met blazer (‘a dress shirt with suit jacket’) or een shirt met jasje (‘a dress shirt with suit jacket’)? Convergence and divergence in Dutch clothing terminology This paper reports on a corpus-based investigation into naming preferences in Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch for fourteen clothing terms. The study is a follow-up of Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999), in which soccer and clothing terminology from 1950, 1970 and 1990 was analysed as an indicator of standardisation in Dutch. This study extends the clothing corpus with new, comparable data from 2012 collected from magazines and shop windows. A profile-based measure of linguistic uniformity quantifies the differences in naming preferences across the 14 concepts between different varieties of Dutch. The results shed new light on the current linguistic situation in the Low Countries. The diachronic convergence between Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch found in Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman (1999) seems to have come to a halt in present-day Dutch. On the other hand, the recent data confirm that the distance between the language in the lower register shop windows and the standard language in magazines remains largest in Belgian Dutch.