The first spelling and grammar of Dutch had a great influence on the written language. Andreas Krogull found evidence for this in both formal and informal texts. This month he will receive the Academic Year Award from the Society of Dutch Literature for his dissertation that he defended in Leiden last year.
In the early nineteenth century, the spelling and grammar of Dutch were first established by the scholars Matthijs Siegenbeek and Petrus Weiland. They were instructed to do this by the Dutch government, which took all kinds of measures to promote national unity. The appearance of Dutch spelling in 1804 and Dutch grammar in 1805 mark an important turning point in the history of Standard Dutch. After all, there was no set language standard before that time.
"What makes the written-language regulation around 1800 such a concrete and perhaps unique case is that a lot of radical innovations were introduced within a few years," says Krogull from Cambridge, where he now works as a postdoc. “The Dutch nation state, the national education system, and thus also the first unity spelling and unity grammar. Government involvement with the language in particular was new.”
Little was known about the influence of the language standard on everyday written language from this period. The linguist examined it on the basis of a large number of texts, partly handwritten. The text corpus he compiled consisted of dozens of letters, diaries, travel reports and newspapers. Half of the writings came from the period before the written language regulation (1770-1790), the other half from the period after (1820-1840). The documents came from seven regions of the Northern Netherlands.
Words with dt
In the field of spelling, the prescribed rules were adopted quite accurately, as the corpus study shows. For example, Siegenbeek introduced a distinction between cht and gt in words like bought and brought, which was followed in about eighty percent of the cases. Siegenbeek was also the first to use the spelling dt in verb forms like he becomes officially established. Its use increased in all texts, but the spelling on d persisted longer in handwritten texts.
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In words like betweens(ch)en and wish(ch) Siegenbeek prescribed sch. This spelling rule turned out to be very effective:even letter writers who wrote an s before this, switched to sch. The spelling of the diphthong ij before y in, for example, my and myn on the other hand, it was less strictly enforced in the handwritten sources. The researcher suspects that the small difference in spelling played a role.
Gender Case
Weiland's grammar rules were less strictly observed than Siegenbeek's spelling rules. According to Krogull, this is partly because grammatical rules are generally more complex. “In the case of the relative pronouns, Weiland approved next to die and that also form like which or which good. According to him, after the house ., one could both that if which to use. But never what ! The difference between the forms was mainly in the use:there were different forms for different contexts or style levels.” You can see that the use differs per context in the corpus:which and which are mainly found in the newspapers, also in diaries and travel reports, but least in personal letters.
But it was not only the complexity of grammatical rules that played a role. “Research also shows that in education and in school textbooks from that time more attention was paid to spelling than to grammatical issues. Awareness of language norms has therefore also played a role. In any case, the results in my dissertation indicate that nineteenth century language users were much more aware of spelling norms than of grammar rules.”
An old-fashioned form that did experience a small revival by Weiland was the genitive case. Although the use of the preposition from the late eighteenth century was already common in constructions such as 'the king's son', Weiland prescribed the genitive case (the genitive) 'the king's son' in his grammar. Following his grammar, this form was used more often in all genres, both in printed and written texts, for both men and women.
Required at school
As today, spelling and grammar rules were mainly introduced in schools and among civil servants. However, this research shows that the rules also permeate beyond education and the civil service. To investigate whether there were major individual differences, Krogull also examined a letter archive consisting of about a hundred private letters from three generations from the Martini Buys family.
The letters show a large variation in compliance with the rules. Moreover, not only the school-age youth, but also the generation above were strongly guided by the spelling rules. This group was not given the language rules in school, but picked them up in the newspapers. “The newspapers also played an important role as a conduit for new language standards,” says Krogull.