Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: In her dissertation, Judith Nobels examines a corpus of 595 seventeenth-century letters written between 1664 and 1672, the period around the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, from a sociolinguistic perspective.The study is part of the Letters as Loot project, which started at Leiden University in 2008 and was directed by Marijke van der Wal (cf.van der Wal and Rutten 2013; Rutten and van der Wal 2014).The project as a whole aimed at investigating sociolinguistic variation in private letters written by people of different social classes in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.The letters under scrutiny, the so-called Sailing Letters, have recently been (re)discovered in the National Archive in Kew, London.The collection consists of about 38,000 seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century commercial and private letters.Nobels' study is situated in the language history from below tradition (cf.Elspaß 2005), which focuses on the writing practices of "ordinary people" from the past.This kind of historical sociolinguistic research has a relatively strong tradition in German and English language history.In Dutch linguistics, most previous work focused on Flemish varieties of the languages (cf.Willemyns and Vandenbussche 2006), but the Letters as Loot project applies the language history from below approach to the Northern varieties of Dutch.A lot of research on seventeenth-century Dutch focused primarily on standardization processes and paid little attention to the variation that existed at that time.In her dissertation, Nobels aimed at detecting and describing this variation for the second half of the seventeenth century.The book consists of ten chapters: the first three give an overview of the research context, the compiled corpus and the methodology used.Chapters 4 to 9 are dedicated to the study of various linguistic features in the corpus.The last chapter summarizes the "rich rewards" (pp.257-268) of the dissertation.In the introduction of her book, Nobels situates her study in a broader theoretical perspective, concisely sketching the research traditions in which
Author: Jill Puttaert
Institution: Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2328953110