>>Flemish (Belgian Dutch) ... What shall I say... I don't want to start a flame ( fleme :) war here, you know what I mean? Oh well, there hasn't been a flame war here since, let me see, at least one week, so let's go. ;)
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>I had a feeling it'd be some sort of a hornet's nest, but since we have people from both countries here, it may become interesting :).
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>I remember sitting through a longish dispute between few Dutch and few Belgians (teenagers, all) about the proper pronunciation of "parrot" (popohoi vs papahai), but then any flames were quickly doused in wine and zuckerwasser.
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>>The Flemings are really stupid. It's a disgrace for the Dutch language. I get the impression that almost all Flemings talk a dialect version only. There are some shows on tv (e.g. survival shows) that have couples from both countries. We don't understand a single word from what the Flemish couples say. We have to read it. Yes, it's translated on screen!
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>We had fun in the opposite direction, seeing how the first Serbian movies shown in Croatia after the wars had to be subtitled, even though everyone understood every word. The moviegoers had great fun catching the discrepancies between the subtitles and what they actually heard.
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> Official policy there was that these are two quite different languages :). Well, now they probably are, it's becoming somewhat difficult to read their newspapers with all the new vocabulary they insert. But common people can still understand each other quite well.

Was it here or was it in the book I'm currently reading. It is the notion that for native speakers a word can have more meanings, but that there is almost always only one meaning that is kind of the official meaning. And that it is only that meaning that is understood by all native speakers and by the non-native speakers. Or, looked at from a slightly different perspective, to describe something there are more words/wordings in the language, but only some are understood by all native and non-native speakers.

Shouldn't that notion be more appreciated here on this international forum?! If Dutch were the language here, I'd most certainly avoid certain ways of saying things.