Brouwer, Leendert2010-03-112010-03-112009Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Onomastic Sciences978-1-55014-521-2http://hdl.handle.net/10315/3620In the 19th century, several scholars in the Netherlands worked on a standardization of spelling of words. Only just after World War II, a uniform spelling was codified. Nobody, however, seemed to care about, or even to think of, an adaptation of the spelling of surnames. In the first decades of the 19th century, due to Napoleon’s enforcement of implementing his Civil Code, all inhabitants were registered with a surname, which from then on never formally changed. This means that the final stage of surname development took place in a period which may be considered as orthographically unstable. For this reason, many names still have many variations nowadays. This often leads to insecurity about the spelling of names. Even someone with an uncomplicated name, such as 'Brouwer', will often be asked, if the name is written with -au- or with -ou-, although this name is identical with the word ‘brouwer’ (= brewer) and 29,000 individuals bear the name 'Brouwer' with -ou-, while only 40 people bear the name 'De Brauwer' ('Brauwer' without an article doesn’t even exist). But we easily accept this kind of inconvenience, because people do not expect names to be treated as words. A surname has a special meaning, particularly when it shows an antique aura.enThe following articles are © 2009 with the individual authors. They are made available free of charge from this page as a service to the community under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative Works license version 3.0. For full details go to http://creativecommons.org.licenses/ny-nd.3.0Dutch SurnamesPersonal Names in the NetherlandsArticle