Changes in professional terms in the Netherlands: Anglicisation and the neutralisation of gender

During the 1980’s many women embarked on professional careers in the Netherlands, at a time when Dutch only had terms for those professions that did not refer explicitly to women. This resulted in a heated debate on the nature of the terms that should be used to refer to the professions: should each profession use one neutral term that would include both women and men, or should each profession have two terms, one referring to men and the other to women? In this paper we will outline this discussion and the history of professional terms referring to women in Dutch (2). In addition, on the basis of a quantitative study, we will show that there has been a widespread tendency towards neutralization and that the Anglicization of Dutch has played an important part in this change (3).