This article investigates native speakers' attitudes toward accent variation in Netherlandic Standard Dutch. Adopting the speaker evaluation paradigm, a demographically controlled sample of listener-judges rated spontaneous speech samples that are representative of four regions in the Netherlands, and from which potentially competing linguistic cues (e.g., pitch and intonation) had not been removed. Speech stimuli were rated on a set of scales integrated from among previous studies conducted in the Low Countries. Regionally marked standard accents activated distinct attitude profiles that were largely invariant with respect to the age, gender, level of education, and regional provenance of the listener-judges. It is argued that these regionally flavored standard varieties were found to be more than social categorization cues: Data reveal that an accent elicits perceptions of its socalled intrinsic euphony and norm status in addition to the status and integrity of its speakers.Although the Dutch language has received attention from perceptual dialectologists and sociolinguistics since Weijnen (1946), research has concentrated almost exclusively on how nonstandard regional varieties are evaluated vis-à-vis Standard Dutch. Surprisingly, little is known about how accent variation in Standard Dutch is perceived. Now, it is generally assumed that regional pronunciation characteristics are penetrating the speech of Netherlandic Standard speakers, leading to the emergence

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This paper reviews the available evidence in support of a diaglossic account (Auer 2005, 2011) of the 20th century history of Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, whereby the national varieties of Dutch are argued to be developing towards a stratificational configuration without discrete intermediate strata between the base dialects and the standard. However, we show that the processes leading to diaglossia differ significantly in the two varieties. While the recent history of Netherlandic Dutch is characterized by downward norm relaxation (top to bottom), Belgian Dutch is characterized by bottom-up (re)standardization. Building on a refined version of Auer’s diaglossic model, we reflect on the exact nature of linguistic standardization in the Low Countries and outline scenarios for the further development of Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch.

This paper reports on a corpus-based analysis of constituent ordering in (Gundel 1988), and rules out any analysis which restricts the constructional meaning of presentative sentences to "introducing an indefinite subject".

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