Dutch philology in the 16th and 17th century
Within a hundred years the first Dutch vernacular orthographies and grammars were published in the Netherlands, as contributions to the cultivation of the language. In a number of these books the authors assumed the independence of the several Dutch dialects; in other publications we find the tendency towards a cultivated language, or we see that the authors started from the existence of a Refined Standard Dutch. However that may be the orthographists and grammarians aimed at the cultivation of written and spoken Dutch.
Generally the grammarians did not pay much attention to two traditional areas of the grammar: orthographia and prosodia, but the etymologia was stressed: the theory of the parts of speech, and – to a lesser degree – the syntaxis.
The influence of Latin grammar on Dutch was enormous, but could not prevent particularly van Heule (1633) and Leupenius (1653) from following their own course, for the most part within the traditional framework. In doing so the grammarians based themselves on the language usage, in which the nature of the language was given a concrete form.