Dutch Language Institute (INT)

The Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (or Dutch Language Institute) is the place for anyone who wants to know anything about the Dutch language through the centuries. It is a scholarly but at the same time easily accessible institute that studies all aspects of the Dutch language, including its vocabulary, grammar and linguistic variations. The institute takes a central position in the Dutch-speaking world (think of Flanders, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles) as a developer, keeper and distributor of corpora, lexica, dictionaries and grammars. With these sustainable language resources, all results of scholarly methods, the Institute of Dutch Language provides the necessary building blocks of the study of Dutch.

Digital Humanities Research Agenda

The institute develops and offers lexical resources and tools for the analysis of large digital corpora of historical and contemporary Dutch. It has been involved in several national and European projects on corpus building and lexicon building. It monitors the development of Dutch language, is involved in updating important reference works such as the Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst and works on terminology lists to make professional jargons accessible. As a CLARIN centre and host of the TST-Centrale (HLT Agency), the institute functions as a host for data and tools from researchers in the Dutch speaking language community. It is also a founder and premium member of the Impact Centre of Competence in Digitisation.

The involvement of the institute in digital humanities has mainly focused on how to improve the accessibility of historical texts. It has been working on providing strategies, data and tools for better OCR and HTR, linguistic annotation and for better search of historical language material. A known result is the historical computational lexicon of Dutch, offered as a web service, which enables users of Delpher.nl to expand a query with historical spelling variants.

Contact

Katrien Depuydt

katrien.depuydt@ivdnt.org

Central Themes

  • Corpus linguistics
  • Historical linguistics and lexicography
  • Text mining
  • e-lexicography

Relevant links

Institute of Dutch Language: www.ivdnt.org