This research project examines the approach of daily newspapers regarding linguisticinnovations. The author discusses how different newspapers cope with language as a livingphenomenon, based on a corpus of interviews with chief editors and language advisorsemployed by the major Flemish and Dutch newspapers. The study is comparative in twoways: on the one hand, the attitudes of popular and quality newspapers are compared. Onthe other hand, interesting parallels and dissimilarities between the two different languageareas are pointed out. The author analyzes a wide range of topics: the feelings towards thespelling reform of 2006, the spelling battle between the ‘Greens’ and the 'Whites’ in theNetherlands, the attitudes concerning linguistic phenomena such as youth language, foreign(often English) words, buzz words and neologisms, tendencies as the coarsening anddeterioration of the (skills in the) mother tongue, and the question whether newspaperlanguage functions either as a reflection of the language of society or as a pedagogicalexample.
