Functional and Facilitating: A Look into the Promotion and Standardization of Dutch as the Official Language in the Netherlands

Abstract

Dutch society is open and international-oriented. A long standing tradition of world trade has contributed to the English proficiency of Dutch citizens. This, however, brings challenges to the status of Dutch as the national official language in the Netherlands. This paper takes the framework of national language capacity building proposed by Wen Qiufang and inspects the Dutch language policy in official language promotion and standardization. Results of the research show that coming from other languages that undermines the position of Dutch as national official language is gradually increasing. The Dutch solution is to put facilitating measures in place and to develop functional tools to support language users and learners. This solution can be valuable for the building of European multilingual landscape with its facilitating feature.

Keywords

• Dutch language policy
• national language capacity
• language policy planning
• European multilingualism