Across Early Modern Europe, far-reaching social, political, and economic changes gave rise to efforts to shape and standardise vernacular languages. In the Low Countries, these efforts took shape in the first Dutch spelling guides, grammars, and dictionaries, which set out tentative norms for a standard written language. At the same time, printed newspapers emerged as a new and widely read medium, reaching audiences across social classes, and potentially serving not only to spread the news, but also newly formulated norms for an emerging standard variety of Dutch.
To assess this possibility, this dissertation examines to what extent grammatical norms codified in the first Dutch grammars (ca. 1550–1650) are reflected in language use in seventeenth-century newspapers (1618–1699). It combines a theoretical analysis of the early normative discourse – its approaches to variation, arguments used to justify selections, and underlying language ideologies – with an empirical investigation of newspaper language. Using the Couranten Corpus (Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal), a large collection of seventeenth-century Dutch newspapers, four grammatical case studies are examined: strong verbs from the third ablaut class, second-, and third-person pronouns, and reflexive pronouns.
By exploring the potential for pre-institutionalised language standardisation ‘from above’ through mediatisation, this study offers new insights into the relationship between codified norms, media, and language use in early standardisation processes. Although the corpus-based findings provide little evidence for the direct dissemination of codified norms through newspapers, they nonetheless suggest that newspapers may have contributed to the emergence of new, more uniform norms of usage.
