It has been hypothesized that the inherently variable and heterogeneous Flemish tussentaal,the supralocal colloquial variety of Dutch, is subject to a (sub)standardizationprocess (Taeldeman 2008). This paper reports on the use of twelve supposedly pan-Flemishsubstandard features by Flemish teenagers in a large corpus of informal chat conversations(more than two million words), in which both the central Brabantic area and theeastern and western peripheral provinces are represented. It investigates the extent towhich the data corroborate this homogenization hypothesis. From a methodological pointof view, it intends to check whether research on written chat data offers a valid alternativefor variational linguistic research on spoken language.
