[XeTeX] English and American quotes

Max Rabkin max.rabkin at gmail.com
Tue Jul 29 17:45:12 CEST 2008


I'm a South African, with English as my first language, but I learnt
Afrikaans at school, and I'm afraid the influence of English (and possibly
also the English QWERTY keyboard) has been too great... I remember seeing
Dutch-style quotation marks in primary school (probably decades-old
readers), and possibly even being taught them at some stage, but recent
books in Afrikaans use high quotes exclusively.

Both Die Burger (http://www.dieburger.com/) and Beeld (
http://www.news24.com/Beeld/) newspapers use high double quotes for quoted
speech (at least in their online editions).

--Max

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 4:25 PM, Wilfred van Rooijen
<wvanrooijen at yahoo.com>wrote:

> Even more off-topic: according to the census of 2003, Afrikaans is still
> more widely spoken in South-Africa than English (although Zulu and Xhosa are
> even more common than Afrikaans). Afrikaans is a descendant of Dutch, and
> South Africa has 'special ties' to the Nederlandse Taalunie, a governmental
> group, composed mainly of Dutch and Flemish members, which has the goal of
> providing unifying rules, grammar and spelling for the several flavors of
> Dutch in use around the world - and to be honest, I didn't realize 'Dutch'
> was spoken in so many places around the world as indicated on the Taalunie's
> map :-)) . As such, I'd guess they use Dutch conventions for quotations
> :-)).
>
> Cheers,
> Wilfred
>
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