The Grote Van Dale and the Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst includehundreds of nouns whose plural can be formed with -(e)n or/and -s without anydifference in meaning. Thanks to the two large electronic corpuses (for Flanders,the weekly magazine Knack, 1991-2000, and for the Netherlands, the dailynewspaper NRC-Handelsblad, 1993-1994) which include over 60 millionswords, the autor has determined which plural was more frequent for some 150common nouns. The study brings out differences between north and southalchough it appears that the magazine Knack has increasingly been usingstandards from the Netherlands over the past few years. A comparison withthe historical Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal shows an evolution towardsplural forms in -s, a trend which is more marked in the south than in thenorth. We can also notice that while GVD and ANS still mention the twoplurals for a number of nouns, in most cases, at least in a written text, as a matterof fact they have only kept one of the two forms, either with -s or with -n.
