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 logics, conducting a synchronic and diachronic study into the grammaticalization of the Dutch indefinite ‘WH dan ook’. After graduating, she worked outside of academia for several years, in both publishing and market research.
In January 2020, she started her PhD project ‘Spread the new(s)! Understanding standardisation 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 this project, Machteld conducts research into which (socio)linguistic factors are decisive in the functional implementation of a standard language, working from the hypothesis that newspapers played a crucial role in the spread of the Dutch standard language during the 17th century, 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