Pluricentric perspectives on written communication in Standard Dutch

The Dutch language area consists of different centres, in different countries, from which the standard language and its development are steered. That pluricentric perspective is relevant to grammatical and lexical differences, but can also be applied to text features that primarily have a function in the communicative context. While differences between countries in the use of verbal communication elements have in some publications mainly been placed in a cross-cultural context, this pluricentric approach to language use provides a broader perspective. Apart from the cultural factor, aspects of language variation, multilingual context, language and communication policy, legislation and education may also influence written communication. This project involves corpus-based research into language use phenomena in written communication in the countries of the language area. In this project, we focus on Flanders, the Netherlands and the Caribbean islands where Dutch is an official language. The corpus research will focus on a set of five text genres from the domain of technical and professional communication (TPC). In those texts, a selection of discursive elements will be identified in order to map pluricentric variation in written communication.