Marijke J. van der Wal

Letters as loot : a sociolinguistic approach to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch

The study of letter writing is at the heart of the historical-sociolinguistic enterprise. Private letters, in particular, offer an unprecedented view on language history. This book presents an in-depth study of the language of letters focussing on a unique collection of Dutch private letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which comprises letters from the lower, middle and upper ranks, written by men as well as women.The monograph discusses the key issues of formulaic language and the degree of orality of private letters, it questions the importance of letter-writing manuals, and reveals remarkable patterns of social, regional and gender variation in a wide range of linguistic features. Arguing for writing experience as an important factor in historical linguistics generally, the book offers numerous new perspectives on the history of Dutch.The book is of interest to a wide readership, ranging from scholars of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, Germanic linguistics, sociology and social history to (advanced) graduate and postgraduate students in courses on language variation and change. The e-book edition of this title is made available as Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

The Practice of Letter Writing: Skills, Models, and Early Modern Dutch Manuals

Abstract In this paper, formulaic language in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch private letters is compared with formulae presented in letter-writing manuals. The most frequent formulae in the Dutch letters show a striking similarity with those found in private letters from other language areas. Such an eye-catching similarity points clearly to a shared European epistolary tradition which has been the topic of various previous studies. Being aware of this widespread tradition, we address the question of how letter writers acquired the formulae characteristic of that tradition by first discussing briefly literacy in the Dutch Republic and by subsequently taking into consideration the possible influence of theory and models provided in letter-writing manuals. After having established similarities and differences between the ‘theory’ of the more modest manuals or schoolbooks and actual practice of private letters, we conclude that direct influence of letter-writing manuals on the actual practice is not very likely. In the same vein as claims made for other languages, we furthermore argue that letter-writing conventions such as formulae were rather acquired by active participation in writing practice.

Change, contact and conventions in the history of Dutch

The paper discusses variation and change in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Dutch, reviewing the importance of two types of explanation, the first focusing on dialect contact resulting from immigration as the locus of change, the second stressing the importance of writing conventions. u sing a unique corpus of private letters from all social ranks, we discuss various phonological and morphosyntactic variables. We argue that ego-documents offer unique opportunities for historical (socio)linguistics, providing an unprecedented view of the vernacular. a t the same time, writers did not consistently put their local dialect to paper. Writing practices such as morphological and syllabic orthographic principles caused the written code to move away from the vernacular. s upralocalization and graphemization, which are topics at the core of historical sociolinguistics, have to be taken into account by anyone interested in the communicative strategies which ordinary people used when they needed to write. a t the same time, since supralocalization and graphemization may impede research on spoken language phenomena, they should also be addressed by researchers primarily interested in spoken language phenomena such as dialect contact.