[seszett]

> there's only one prestige Dutch dialect though

Which one would that be? AN which nobody actually uses (at least here in Flanders)?

I don't know much about how it works within the Netherlands but within Belgium at least the Dutch accent gives you no prestige at all. I would expect the reverse to be true in the Netherlands (whichever accent one would choose to represent the Flemish) since the Dutch sometimes don't even recognise Flemish speakers as native Dutch speakers and answer in English instead.

Afrikaans is a related but separate language. Suriname, as the third Dutch speaking country, does use the same spellings as Belgium and the Netherlands.

[bobthepanda]

“Prestige” dialect is the term in linguistics for what is the favored standard taught in schools, used in business and media broadcasts, etc.

My understanding of Dutch is that Dutch media from Suriname to Belgium to NL uses the same prestige dialect. If you were to write a statement for a court, there is exactly one dialect that would be appropriate.

This is not true with English, where each major English speaking region teaches its own standard of English as the standard.

[gpvos]

The prestige dialect in Flanders, as spoken on the main news and public affairs programmes on public television (I don't know about the schools and courts), is already very recognizably different from that in the Netherlands, with its soft "g", slightly different vowels and somewhat different vocabulary. But it is losing terrain fast: the commercial TV channels, and entertainment programmes on public TV, are mostly using a hybrid between Flemish dialects and the (former?) prestige dialect that rather leans towards the Brabant dialect ("tussentaal"). Netherlands Dutch and Flemish Dutch, while still mutually understandable without much effort, have started to diverge more in the last decades. Although I haven't noticed people replying in English yet.

[CRConrad]

But then Flemish often claims to be a separate language from — as opposed to a dialect of — Dutch, doesn't it?

[gpvos]

Some people do. Linguists on the whole don't, and it will be a long while before they do. Literature is still completely shared, and we can read each other's newspapers with zero problems.

It's good to distinguish between Flemish as the group of dialects spoken in roughly the provinces of East- and West-Flanders, and Flemish as the broad name for everything that's not quite the standard language in the larger region of Flanders, which is the Dutch-speaking half of Belgium and includes three more provinces. I'm not sure which of those two those people refer to.