oa Weijnen en de waarde van het dialect

Weijnen paid elaborate attention to the societal position of dialects already in his earliest work, in a respectful way, without any romantic cherishing. The goals of language policy and language education needed to be directed, in his view, to competence in the standard language. That meant that dialects were especially relevant from a scientific, linguistic point of view. He focused his academic work on dialect geography, not on sociolinguistic issues like the balance and relationship between the standard language and its dialects. In his last productive years he nevertheless returned to the issue of the societal value and role of dialects, by pleading for a political recognition of Dutch dialect groups under the heading of European regional languages.