Machteld de Vos studied Dutch language and culture (BA) and philosophy (BA) at the University of Amsterdam, and European Literature and Culture (MPhil) at the University of Cambridge. For her bachelor’s thesis, she combined the fields of linguistics and logic and conducted a synchronous study into the grammaticalization of a Dutch indefinite. After graduating, she was employed by several publishing houses and worked in market research.
In January 2020, she started her PhD ‘Spread the new(s)! Understanding standardization of Dutch through 17th-century newspapers’ at the Radboud University and the Dutch Language Institute (INT) under the supervision of prof. dr. Nicoline van der Sijs and prof. dr. Helen de Hoop. Within the bounds of this project, Machteld conducts research into which linguistic and sociolinguistic factors determine the functional implementation of a standard language. Her work is guided by the hypothesis that newspapers have played a crucial role in the spread of the Dutch standard language, as they were the first mass medium to be read by people from all social classes.
Publications
- de Vos, M. & van der Meulen, M. (2024). Suppressed no more: prescriptivism and the evaluation of optional variability. In N. Yáñez‐Bouza, M. Rodríguez‐Gil & J. Pérez‐Guerra (Eds.), New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research, pp. 296-318.
- de Vos, M. & Vogl, U. (2024). “Wel iet wat verschelende, maar zó niet óf elck verstaat ander zeer wel”. On language making in early modern mono- and multilingual grammars and textbooks in the Low Countries. In: Belgian Journal of Linguistics 37, pp. 37-73.
- de Vos, M. (2023). Het stijlboek van de weduwe: ontluikende standaardtaal in 17e-eeuwse kranten? In: Neerlandia 4, pp. 32-35.
- de Vos, M. (2022). In Between Description and Prescription: Analysing Metalanguage in Normative Works on Dutch 1550–1650. In: Languages 2022, 7, 89. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7020089
- de Vos, M. (2022). ‘Deze verscheydenheyt der Voornamen’. Codification of third-person pronouns in Early Modern Dutch. Taal en Tongval 74 (1), pp. 107-146. https://doi.org/10.5117/TET2022.1.005.VOS