For a long time French was the prestige variety in the whole of Belgium, including the northern part, Flanders, where in daily life Germanic varieties were spoken. The resistance against the dominance of French in Flanders grew gradually in the nineteenth century, at first mainly among Flemish middle-class intellectuals, and culminated in the course of the twentieth century into the large-scale, widely popular and explicitly nationalist Vlaamse Beweging [Flemish Movement]. Its proponents, the so-called ‘flamingants’, demanded linguistic rights for the Flemings and eventually managed to consolidate these rights in aseries of laws that formed the basis of Flanders as a separate political entity from 1970 onwards. However, the question what language these rights were being demanded for was in the nineteenth century still the subject of debate among linguists and intellectuals. Eventually a dominant majority preferred the adoption of Standard Dutch, as it had been developed in the Netherlands, over the development of an endogenous Flemish standard. The Flemish dialects and the administrative register that existed at the time were thought to be too strongly influenced by French and therefore unsuitable to base a standard on, and it was believed that Dutch would better be able to withstand the prestige of French (Vosters 2013; Willemyns 2013). The nineteenth and the early twentieth century saw an outpouring of publications and the foundation of several grassroots organizations aimed at purifying language use and promoting the Dutch norm in Flanders (Absillis 2009; Willemyns 2013). The peak of standardization efforts, however, can be situated roughly between 1950 and 1980, when the public broadcaster VRT joined in the efforts of schools, newspapers, magazines and grassroots organizations to further the spread of what was then still called Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands [General Civilized Dutch], ABN in short (see Jaspers & Van Hoof 2013). The VRT engaged professional language advisors to see to it that all presenters spoke faultless Standard Dutch, and filled prime time slots on radio and TV with instructional languages programmes presented by ABN activists.