Chaos and standards: Orthography in the Southern Netherlands (17201830)

This paper discusses metalinguistic discourse and orthographical practice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the southern Netherlands (‘Flanders’). Whereas a lot is known about Dutch language standardiza-tion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what happened after that, especially in the southern territories, is still partly uncharted territory. This contribution will examine and challenge the myths of language decline and linguistic chaos that are often associated with eighteenth and early nine-teenth-century Flanders. The authors show that there was a vivid and co-herent normative tradition, especially on the level of orthography, and that even a case of apparent orthographical disorder, such as the so-called ac-cent spelling, can be counted as an instance of language standardization in the eighteenth-century southern Netherlands