This week five national newspapers are going to publish one of their pages in simplified Dutch. The action, announced by the Reading and Writing Foundation, forms part of the annual Literacy Week.
The five participating dailies are Sp!ts, Metro, De Pers, the Volkskrant and Trouw. The page in simplified Dutch will be a news, sports or entertainment section.
The aim is to show the linguistic level of some 1.5 million adults in the Netherlands who are "functionally illiterate", which prevents them from fully participating in today's information society.
According to the Reading and Writing Foundation, approximately one million of them are native Dutch speakers and approximately 500,000 are non-native Dutch-speakers. Among the one million native Dutch speakers, 250,000 are almost completely illiterate.
© Radio Netherlands Worldwide
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