Part of
Letter Writing in Late Modern EuropeEdited by Marina Dossena and Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 218] 2012
► pp. 139–162
Edited by Marina Dossena and Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 218] 2012
► pp. 139–162
Letters as loot
Confiscated Letters filling major gaps in the History of Dutch
In this contribution, we will introduce the recently rediscovered collection of Dutch documents from the second half of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, comprising over 38,000 letters, both commercial and private ones. The socio-historical linguistic value of these private letters, kept in the National Archives (Kew, UK), will be indicated by discussing a few illustrative cases. Examining the linguistic phenomena of h-dropping and n-deletion in a selection of letters from the Letters as Loot-corpus, compiled at the University of Leiden, we will show that they reveal the linguistic variation of the past and give access to the everyday language of people from all social ranks, thus filling major gaps in the history of Dutch. A social and gender distribution found for the usage of formulaic language suggests a connection with socially stratified writing experience.
Cited by
Cited by 11 other publications
Dossena, Marina
2015. Introduction. In Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 4], ► pp. 1 ff. 
Jacobs, Bart & Marijke J. van der Wal
2015. The discovery, nature, and implications of a Papiamentu text fragment from 1783. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 30:1 ► pp. 44 ff.
Martineau, France
2014. L’Acadie et le Québec : convergences et divergences. Minorités linguistiques et société :4 ► pp. 16 ff.
Nobels, Judith & Gijsbert Rutten
2014. Language norms and language use in seventeenth-century Dutch. In Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900 [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 3], ► pp. 21 ff.
Padilla-Moyano, Manuel
2015. A new view of Basque through eighteenth-century correspondence. In Language Variation - European Perspectives V [Studies in Language Variation, 17], ► pp. 169 ff.
Simons, Tanja & Gijsbert Rutten
2014. Language norms and language use in eighteenth-century Dutch. In Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900 [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 3], ► pp. 49 ff.
van der Wal, Marijke
2018. Early Modern migrants in a language contact setting: Characteristics of the Dutch Heusch correspondence (1664–1665)
. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 4:2 ► pp. 253 ff.
van der Wal, Marijke
2021. The black box of delegated writing: Early Modern scribes and female literacy in The Netherlands. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 7:2 ► pp. 303 ff.
van der Wal, Marijke & Gijsbert Rutten
2013. The Practice of Letter Writing: Skills, Models, and Early Modern Dutch Manuals. Language & History 56:1 ► pp. 18 ff.
Vaneker, Karin
2014. Mrs. Vanderbilt's Puffert. Food, Culture & Society 17:3 ► pp. 451 ff.
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.