Various characteristics of historical letters, such as formulaic language and forms of address, have been analysed from a politeness perspective (e.g., Bijkerk [2004] and Tiisala [2004]) and sometimes also explicitly from a sociopragmatic perspective (Nevala 2004a). In Rutten and van der Wal (2014), we analysed Dutch private letters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the many changes occurring in the system of forms of address, which includes both nominal and pronominal forms, can be modelled sociopragmatically, with reference to both sociolinguistic factors and politic behaviour in the sense of Watts (2003). We also observed differences between the private letters in our corpus and a limited number of business letters that we had at our disposal at the time, and it is this issue that we explore in this paper. On the basis of a recently compiled subset of business letters by seventeenth-century merchants (van der Wal and Rutten 2024), of whom we also have private letters, we first analyse the distribution of forms of address in the business letters against the background of what we know about private letters in general. We then compare qualitatively the use of forms of address in the business letters with private letters by the same writers, focussing on three prolific authors.

In this paper, I intend to analyze, from a historical sociolinguistic perspective, the characteristics of Dutch letters written by economic migrants in the late eighteenth century. These letters, which are part of the Leiden Letters as Loot corpora, were confiscated by the English during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and the American War of Independence (1776–1784). After presenting the method of finding such non-native communication, the linguistic complexity of the letter writers’ regions of origin will be discussed. Focusing on letter writers from the North Frisian islands and East Frisia, their command of Dutch will be determined by examining both deviating features and two Dutch phenomena, the epistolary forms of address and the first person singular object (or oblique) pronouns. Different levels of Dutch proficiency can be attributed to biographical details and may also lead to hypotheses for subsequent research of letter writers of German and Scandinavian origin.

In this article, we examine, quantitatively and qualitatively, Dutch business letters written by merchants, focusing on formulaic phrases and French suffix borrowing. The letters are part of the Prize Papers, the collection of documents confiscated by the English during times of warfare. We compare these business letters to private letters from the same source, and address the question whether the business letters constitute a particular register. The business letters, written by upper and upper-middle ranked male merchants from the seventeenth century, appear to differ from private letters written by people with a similar social profile. Frequent formulae highly characteristic of seventeenth-century private letters occur to a much lesser extent, if at all, in the business letters. Other formulae, some including Romance origin items (Laus deo, saluut, cordiale), occur more frequently in the business letters. The frequency of verbs with the French-origin suffix -eren is found to be higher in the business letters than in the private letters. Functional explanations are presented for these register differences: formulaic language is correlated with writing experience, and the use of French-origin items may be connected to the common vocabulary used in international trading networks. Similarities in phrasing are also revealed in a qualitative analysis of examples of private and business letters by the same writer. This finding demonstrates how similar private and business letters often were, thus challenging the idea of distinct registers.

In this paper, I intend to analyze, from a historical sociolinguistic perspective, the characteristics of Dutch letters written by economic migrants in the late eighteenth century. These letters, which are part of the Leiden Letters as Loot corpora, were confiscated by the English during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and the American War of Independence (1776-1784). After presenting the method of finding such non-native communication, the linguistic complexity of the letter writers' regions of origin will be discussed. Focusing on letter writers from the North Frisian islands and East Frisia, their command of Dutch will be determined by examining both deviating features and two Dutch phenomena, the epistolary forms of address and the first person singular object (or oblique) pronouns. Different levels of Dutch proficiency can be attributed to biographical details and may also lead to hypotheses for subsequent research of letter writers of German and Scandinavian origin.

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In this contribution, we present the Historical Corpus of Dutch (HCD), a new multi-genre, diachronic corpus of Early and Late Modern Dutch (ca. 1550-1850). It consists of a digitised collection of handwritten administrative texts (e.g. town council meeting reports), handwritten ego-documents (e.g. diaries and travelogues), and printed pamphlets (e.g. of a political or religious nature). The corpus is also balanced between northern and southern material, with data from the provinces of Holland and Zeeland for the North, and from Flanders and Brabant for the South. After having discussed its structure and composition, we will illustrate the value of the new corpus with a number of smaller case studies. Based on our experiences with the corpus, we will conclude by launching a plea for historical corpus building not to focus too much on the quantity of data (‘big data’), but rather shift attention to data quality.

This contribution focuses on lexical changes that took place in Dutch up to and including the nineteenth century under the influence of French, with a particular focus on the eighteenth century. The analysis is based on the Language of Leiden (lol) corpus, which is specifically built to trace French influence on Dutch. The corpus contains Dutch textual materials from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, originating from seven social domain important in the history of Leiden. The paper traces lexical borrowings from French through time and across social domains.

At the start of each research enterprise, historical sociolinguists have to deal with the key issue of the required historical data. In the present world of big data optimism, the idea may arise that the time-consuming compilation of specialised corpora is no longer needed. Can taking a shortcut still lead us to convincing results? In this article I discuss the crucial relationship between specific research questions and appropriate historical data. This methodological issue will be illustrated by concentrating on three historical-sociolinguistic research programmes, conducted at Leiden University: Letters as loot: Towards a non-standard view on the history of Dutch (2008-2013), Going Dutch: The construction of Dutch in policy, practice and discourse (2013-2018) and Pardon my French? Dutch-French language contact in the Netherlands, 1500-1900 (2018-2023). What do we learn from these large-scale projects which address different research questions and focus on different periods in the history of Dutch? The use of specific sources, handwritten material such as ego-documents, a multi-genre approach and details of corpus compilation will be discussed. The various approaches and results are considered against the background of methodological developments and current debates in historical sociolinguistics. I argue and conclude that the careful compilation of specialised corpora remains essential as a solid foundation for historical sociolinguistic research.

Abstract Apart from literacy rates and reading and writing acquisition, the actual writing practices of the past, which include the phenomenon of delegated writing, belong to a history of literacy. Delegated writing occurred when illiterate or partly literate individuals wanted to keep in contact with relatives at a distance and had to rely on the assistance of professional or social scribes. The details of this process and the role played by the sender of a letter and its actual, usually unknown, scribe often remain unclear, although different scenarios may be assumed. Cultural historian Lyons explored scenarios for delegated writing in France, Italy and Spain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the writing of ordinary people during the First World War and in the age of mass migration. For the Dutch language area, we have the opportunity to delve further back in time by exploring the late-seventeenth-century part of the Letters as Loot (LAL) corpus. This corpus previously allowed us to establish linguistic differences between autographs and non-autographs. For a detailed view of the delegated writing process, however, the LAL corpus also provides us with instances of two types of letters written by the same, identified, female scribes: their own letters and the letters they wrote for others. A comparative analysis of these different letters will be shown to contribute to opening the black box of Early Modern delegated writing.

Abstract The present article demonstrates how research on confiscated late-seventeenth-century letters allows us to gain insight into linguistic practices of second and third generations of Dutch-speaking migrants who lived in the German city of Hamburg, in a predominantly Low German region. The historical background of the preserved Heusch correspondence, spoken and written communication in merchant circles, and foreign language learning will be discussed. Apart from examining features such as epistolary formulae, ellipsis, and code switching, the question is also addressed of the degree to which interference from Low (or High) German is found. An analysis of the letters reveals both adoption of the Low German reflexive pronoun sick and a diverse pattern of using the relative particle so, which is shown to be a clear case of adopting (and maybe even extending) a supraregional German relativisation strategy.

The paper focuses on three important themes in historical sociolinguistics: (1) the emergence of national language planning in the Netherlands around 1800, (2) the influence of historical prescriptivism on usage, and (3) genre as a crucial factor in explaining variation and change. The case study deals with relativisation, particularly the neuter relative pronoun in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch. Analysing both internal and external factors, we show that the definiteness of the antecedent does not explain the variation, contrary to what is assumed in the research literature. Likewise, a strong effect of language norms on usage patterns cannot be established. The crucial factor turns out to be genre.

The paper discusses the significant relativization change from d-forms into w-forms in the history of Dutch. Focusing on relative adverbs and relative pronominal adverbs in particular, we examine 17th-century data taken from the Leiden Letters as Loot Corpus, a collection of private letters written by men and women of all social ranks. It is shown that one specific type of relative clause appropriates w-forms at a remarkably fast rate, i.e. continuative relative clauses. Against the background of an evolutionary perspective on grammaticalization, the w-preference of continuative relative clauses is treated as an example of the syntactic coding of discourse continuity and in particular as an intersubjective effort to create coherence. Since continuative relative clauses are often considered typical of written language, the paper also provides evidence that the written medium may promote grammaticalization.

In this paper, we discuss the recent discovery of four letters written in 1783, one of which is written fully in Papiamentu, the other three comprising Papiamentu fragments. The data in these constitute one of the earliest written attestations of Papiamentu. We first provide a brief overview of the earliest attestations of Papiamentu and then present theLetters as Lootresearch programme, to which we owe the discovery of the 1783 letters. Following this, the article discusses the contents of the letters and the socio-historical context in which they were written. To close, we discuss the value of this new source for Papiamentu studies.

Chapter 7. Frenchification in discourse and practice: loan morphology in Dutch private letters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was published in Past, Present and Future of a Language Border on page 143.

This article presents the results of an extensive coring programme and a test excavation at Wetsingermaar (province of Groningen, the Netherlands). The corings made clear that the archaeological site spans over 1.5 ha and islocated on the waterfront of a submerged Pleistocene ridge. The test excavation yielded ceramics, flints and other stone material, and archaeozoological remains. On the basis of its cultural remains it is concluded that Wetsingermaar constitutes an early site of the Funnel Beaker Culture ( Trichterbecherkultur , TRB), predating the Horizon 1 of Drouwen TRB as defined by Brindley (1988b). This early phase is termed pre-Drouwen TRB (cf. Bakker, 1979: 115). The flint industry is similar to younger TRB assemblages, while the ceramic and archaeozoological evidence is difficult to interpret as a result of the fragmentary condition of the finds and the near absence of contemporaneous sites.