The Dikke Van Dale shows how the Netherlands is changing

I am a fan of reference books. beautiful books †The General Dutch Art of Speech†† quirky writers (Halliwells Filmgoers Companion), anticipation of a new edition (Oors Popencyclopedia† It is wonderful to live in the realization that you can find the answer to every possible question in your bookcase.

And then came the internet.

All in all, only one book survived that devastating blow. At eye level, up for grabs, all my life (minus 17 years) it has been Van Dale Large dictionary of the Dutch language, the Dikke Van Dale, or simply Van Dale. I am ready for my fifth edition, the one from 2015, the first to feature illustrations and colours. And I can’t wait for the next one, which comes out March 22.

Why look forward to something as dull as the new edition of a dictionary? Ton den Boon (59), editor-in-chief of Van Dale, immediately answered the telephone: ‘I have a perhaps somewhat strange hobby, but I like to put a few editions of Van Dale next to each other on a rainy Sunday afternoon, to read entries with to compare each other. This shows how the Netherlands has changed. You can read all social changes from a dictionary. The word climate took up maybe four lines in 1984, when I started at Van Dale, now, with all the associated compositions, more than three pages.’

Mirror of time

You could argue that the gloss is off a paper dictionary. Also (final) editors of the newspaper actually only use the online edition. The biggest advantage of this is that Van Dale’s editors can quickly respond to current events. For example, in April 2018 the adjective non-binary was added and in February 2021 the noun non-binary. That online edition is constantly changing; words are not only added, words are also disappearing. Den Boon: ‘We are about to add an omikron variant. But that is typically a composition that may have fallen into disuse again in a few years. And then we remove it again, although it remains in our database.’

And precisely because the online edition is different every day, a paper edition is indispensable, says Den Boon. ‘A dictionary is a mirror of time. Each new paper edition fixes such a moment. It will always be that way.’ He considers it an advantage that a paper publication is always behind the times. “We can come to a settled judgment.”

The decision to publish a new paper edition is made by the publisher, the editors do not have a decisive say. Fifteen editions have been published in the 150 years of its existence (only the second, in 1874 was called Van Dale, so that the 150th anniversary can be celebrated again in 2022). There are fewer years than average between the most recent (2015) and the next edition (2022). Are language and society changing faster? Den Boon: ‘Yes, I think so. I really noticed an acceleration in the late 1990s. The internet, citizen journalism and social media made language more diverse, which means that there were more sources that also spread more quickly.’

Find new words

In other words, the language community – columnists, commentators, journalists, writers – from which the editors receive their material, grew rapidly with the arrival of bloggers, vloggers and influencers. Although the ‘edited media’ are still the most important source. By this Den Boon means ‘sources whose texts are edited by a final editor on the basis of style books’. Incidentally, each edition is introduced with a word of thanks to all private contributors, some of whom (including the Dutch and Flemish Scrabble Association) are mentioned by name. Because although the editors have access to a large data network (from other publishers, among others), the finds of old-fashioned collectors are treated just as seriously. ‘There are people who go through the advertising brochures of supermarkets and other shops every week looking for new words, which they send us. Great, because we sometimes miss such niches.’

But those new words, Den Boon emphasizes, are not the best. The maintenance work, that’s the most fun. Words have to be labeled differently (‘obsolete’), descriptions have to be adapted (should the material be called bone in the new edition at ‘comb’?) and also grammatical matters sometimes have to be decided: should the construction ‘ make a decision’ already added? If the latter makes it to the new edition and if angry letter writers turn to the editors, Den Boon has his answer ready: ‘In order to survive, a language needs dynamism. A language that does not change is doomed.’