As a starting point, this paper offers a theoretical discussion of a number of widely used yet diversely conceived concepts: (standard) language ideology, identity, agency, and indexicality. Using these concepts, we analyze a number of illustrative interview extracts from a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with Flemish primary and secondary school teachers. Our goal is twofold. First, we discuss how Flemish teachers perceive (the importance of) Standard Dutch and other, nonstandard varieties of Dutch. Second, we show how these perceptions discursively shape teacher identities of authenticity, authority, and professionalism.

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Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, is experiencing growing intraand interlingual diversity. On the intralingual level, Tussentaal ('in-between-language') has emerged as a cluster of intermediate varieties between the Flemish dialects and Standard Dutch, gradually becoming the colloquial language. At the same time, Flanders is encountering increasing numbers of immigrants and their languages. This paper analyses the way Flemish language-in-education policy deals with perceived problems of substandardisation and multilingualism, in order to create equal opportunities for all pupils, regardless of their native language or social background. Both the policy and the measures it proposes are strongly influenced by different, yet intertwined ideologies of standardisation and monolingualism. By propagating Standard Dutch as the only acceptable language and by denying all forms of language diversity, Flemish language-in-education policy not only fails to create equal opportunities, but also reinforces ideologies that maintain inequality. Instead, language policy should be open towards language diversity, taking the role of teachers in forming and implementing policies into consideration.Keywords: language-in-education policy; standard language ideology; monolingualism; social inequality; Dutch in Flanders; Tussentaal Language policy: ideology, planning and practice Language policies are present in some form in all domains of society (Ricento, 2006). It is in the domain of education, however, that such policies have the most impact on the members of society, as language-in-education policies play a paramount role in how a society articulates and plans for the future of its members (Liddicoat, 2013). Official documents are the most overt and articulated forms of language policy, but policies also exist in more covert forms, underlying the practices of language use and language learning in education. As such, policies discuss societal beliefs and attitudes about the value of languages or language varieties: which languages or language varieties are considered to have the most value regarding future societal success for pupils, and subsequently have a place in the classroom? This inextricable link between policy and society is used by Djité (1994) to discern between two kinds of processes in language policy: (i) processes at the societal level, where certain problems (e.g. social inequality) are formulated, together with possible solutions and (ii) at the linguistic level, where the linguistic norms which a community will use (or is expected to use) are selected.

This introductory paper provides an outline of the recent research on processes of destandardization and demotization in national standard languages across Europe, with a focus on the standard language dynamics in the Dutch language area. On the basis of a state-of-the-art-description, a number of remaining theoretical and methodological issues are identified, which the papers included in this thematic issue address from multiple perspectives.

Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, is facing a growing intra- andinterlingual diversity. On the intralingual level, tussentaal ('in-between-language’)emerged as a cluster of intermediate varieties between the Flemish dialects and StandardDutch, gradually becoming the colloquial language. At the same time, Flemish language-in-education policy strongly propagates Standard Dutch as the only acceptable language(variety) in the classroom, demonstrating the vigour of standard language ideology (SLI)in Flanders. This paper analyses the distinct ways in which teachers try to make sense ofthe gap between policy and practice, and how they act upon what is expected from themin a classroom context. By analysing interview data of eight teachers from a secondaryschool in the city of Ghent (East Flanders), I make an attempt at mapping their 'personalideological frameworks’, in order to uncover the ways in which teachers respond to language-in-education policies and strong standard language ideologies.