Contemporary Dutch

  • Berichtauteur Door job
  • Berichtdatum 27/08/2025
  • Leestijd 3 minuten Leestijd 3 minuten
/ english / Documenting the Dutch Language / Contemporary Dutch /

The Dutch Language Institute’s (INT) work towards documenting the Dutch language through the ages, in all its variety, includes documenting contemporary Dutch. The institute’s infrastructure of contemporary Dutch consists of several key components, such as corpora, a central lexicon, dictionaries, a reference grammar and terminological databases.

Corpora

Corpora constitute an essential part of the infrastructure of the Dutch language. They provide an empirical foundation for linguistic research, facilitating systematic analysis of language change and language variation, and the development of practically-oriented grammars, dictionaries and educational materials. A large part of the institute’s work on corpora is primarily focused on the description of the Dutch vocabulary – one of the institute’s key activities – but the versatile infrastructure supports research in various disciplines. To monitor aspects of contemporary Dutch, the INT has created the Corpus of Contemporary Dutch (Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands or CHN). This is an ever-growing collection of over 2,500,000 texts from newspapers, magazines, news broadcasts, blogs and books from Flanders, the Netherlands, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. 

Lexicography

The INT develops and hosts a number of databases and applications that document the vocabulary of contemporary Dutch. 

The institute manages a central lexicon called GiGaNT, which aims to provide information about spelling and morphology for all words in the Dutch language. The two parts of this lexicon, Hilex and Molex, are dedicated to historical Dutch and contemporary Dutch, respectively. Molex also serves as the underlying database for the Word List of the Dutch Language with the official Dutch spelling, published by the Union for the Dutch Language (Taalunie).

Moreover, the INT hosts several dictionaries that describe different aspects of the vocabulary of contemporary Dutch. The General Dictionary (Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek or ANW) is a corpus-based, digital dictionary of contemporary Dutch in the Netherlands, Flanders, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. It describes words from 1970 to the present, more or less covering the period of post-war generations of adult language users. The aim of the ANW editors is to describe the lexicon of the Dutch language as accurately as possible. The current focus lies on neologisms that have become part of the Dutch lexicon.

A further focus on neologisms is present in the Dictionary of New Words (Woordenboek van Nieuwe Woorden or WNW), an online dictionary in progress that describes words (or word combinations) that have entered the Dutch language or gained a new meaning since the year 2000. The CHN is an important source that the WNW uses to describe new words. The Word Pollster application (Woordpeiler) supports the visualization and analysis of word frequencies in the CHN over time.

The phraseology of contemporary Dutch is analyzed and described in the project Woordcombinaties (Word combinations).  The project develops an integrated lexicographical resource combining a collocation and idiom dictionary with a pattern dictionary. It was created to make phraseological information more easily accessible, so that idiomatic language can be more easily mastered. 

Finally, Translation vocabulary (Vertaalwoordenschat) is an application for hosting a family of bilingual dictionaries with Dutch as its source- or target language, developed for languages that are relevant to Dutch users, but that were not often catered for on the commercial market. Language pairs include Dutch with Arabic, Danish, Estonian, European Portuguese, Finnish and New Greek. 

Grammar

Documenting all aspects of contemporary Dutch also involves describing its grammar. To this end, the INT is responsible for hosting and maintaining the General Dutch Grammar (Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst or ANS), the go-to reference grammar for Dutch since 1984. Written in Dutch, it is the most extensive current description of all grammatical aspects of contemporary Dutch. The online e-ANS is currently being revised, so that it reflects not only recent insights from research into Dutch grammar, but also the vision of Dutch as a pluricentric language. 

Terminology

To support specialized communication, the INT’s Centre of Expertise for Dutch Terminology (Expertisecentrum Nederlandstalige Terminologie or ENT) is, among other things, focused on the development of terminological databases for a number of important domains and on strengthening and developing the terminology of the Dutch language. The website of the ENT also permanently provides access to external contemporary terminology lists that are available online.

Further information and links:

Contact persons: