Writing Early and Late Modern Dutch. A Sociolinguistic Perspectiv

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In this talk, I will review a number of historical-sociolinguistic case studies carried out on Early and Late Modern Dutch over the past years. The data will mostly come from corpora comprising ego-documents (private letters, diaries) produced in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Crucial issues are the relationship between local pronunciation and supralocal writing traditions, and the writing strategies available to less-experienced writers. In the course of time, standardization and language planning become increasingly important with significant impact on language variation and change. I will also discuss the implications of these case studies for theories of standardization.