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Part of
Investigating West Germanic Languages: Studies in honor of Robert B. Howell
Edited by Jennifer Hendriks and B. Richard Page
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics 8] 2024
► pp. 225–257

Non-native communication in eighteenth-century maritime circles

Dutch letters written by economic migrants

| Leiden University
In this paper, I intend to analyze, from a historical sociolinguistic perspective, the characteristics of Dutch letters written by economic migrants in the late eighteenth century. These letters, which are part of the Leiden Letters as Loot corpora, were confiscated by the English during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and the American War of Independence (1776–1784). After presenting the method of finding such non-native communication, the linguistic complexity of the letter writers’ regions of origin will be discussed. Focusing on letter writers from the North Frisian islands and East Frisia, their command of Dutch will be determined by examining both deviating features and two Dutch phenomena, the epistolary forms of address and the first person singular object (or oblique) pronouns. Different levels of Dutch proficiency can be attributed to biographical details and may also lead to hypotheses for subsequent research of letter writers of German and Scandinavian origin.
Keywords: language contact, Low German, Frisian dialects, language choice, multilingualism, interference
Article outline
  • 1.Early and Late Modern migrants in the Dutch Republic
  • 2.Communicative practices of migrants
  • 3.Confiscated papers: Letters as Loot
  • 4.Ways of finding non-native communication
  • 5.Checking identified individuals and their literacy
  • 6.Results of a quest for migrants and their backgrounds
    • 6.1The number of letter writers and their origin
    • 6.2Language choice and linguistic characteristics
  • 7.The complex regions of origin
  • 8.Letter writers from the North Frisian islands
    • 8.1Bernardus and Daniel Knuttel: Interjections, mijn and a few German traces
    • 8.2Forms of address, mijn and deviating orthographical and phonological features
    • 8.3Preliminary conclusions
  • 9.Letter writers from East Frisia
    • 9.1The reflexive: A Frisian characteristic
    • 9.2Another language choice
    • 9.3Similar formulae, deviating orthographical and phonological features
    • 9.4Preliminary conclusions
  • 10.Conclusions, reflection and future research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Websites
Published online: 16 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.8.11van
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