Bijna-identieke toponiemen langs de rijksgrens: hoe weerspiegelen ze het taalkundige, bestuurlijke en culturele verleden?1

Near-identical twin toponyms along the state border. How do they reflect the linguistic and political past? The Netherlands (hereafter: NL) shares its national border with Belgium (B) and Germany (D). Alongside the border are toponyms which are either identical (like Lemiers: NL, also D), or near-identical, like Clinge (NL)/ De Klinge (B) or Aamsveen (NL)/ Amtsvenn (D). The names concerned denote adjoining settlements and regions. Name pairs like Aamsveen/ Amtsvenn, differring in pronunciation, are comparable to name pairs like Görlitz/ Zgorzelec, on the German-Polish border. The Belgian border is not a linguistic one; Dutch is the standard language on both sides of it. The German border, however, currently divides two standard languages, while there used to be a continuum on the dialectal level until until about 1940. Since the 19th C, both the Dutch and the German standard language have won ground at the expense of the dialect, due to the increased influence of the national administrations. This paper focuses on present twin names along the Dutch state border which show small differences. For example, some differences are (partly) orthographic (Clinge (NL)/De Klinge (B)), others imply (partial) translations and folk etymological adaptations (Aamsveen (NL)/ Amtsvenn (D)), or relate to lexical differences: Baarle Hertog (B) versus Baarle Nassau (NL). The paper proposes a typology and tries to explain the differences by relating them (with respect to the German border) to increased influence of the German standard language and orthography (and, by consequence, spelling pronunciation), and, with regard to the Belgian border, to different spelling regulations.