Abstract
Historical metalinguistic discourse is known to often prescribe linguistic variants that are not very frequent in actual language use, and to proscribe frequent variants. Infrequent variants that are promoted through prescription can be innovations, but they can also be conservative forms that have already largely vanished from the spoken language and are now also disappearing in writing. An extreme case in point is the genitive case in Dutch. This has been in decline in usage from at least the thirteenth century onwards, gradually giving way to analytical alternatives such as prepositional phrases. In the grammatical tradition, however, a preference for the genitive case was maintained for centuries. When ‘standard’ Dutch is officially codified in 1805 in the context of a national language policy, the genitive case is again strongly preferred, still aiming to ‘revive’ the synthetic forms. The striking discrepancy between metalinguistic discourse on the one hand, and developments in language use on the other, make the genitive case in Dutch an interesting case for historical sociolinguistics. In this paper, we tackle various issues raised by the research literature, such as the importance of genre differences as well as variation within particular genres, through a detailed corpus-based analysis of the influence of prescription on language practices in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch.
Highlights
Historical metalinguistic discourse is known to often prescribe linguistic variants that are not very frequent in actual language use, and to proscribe frequent variants
We analysed the success of the first Dutch national language policy on patterns of language use
The genitive case is a relatively complex grammatical feature, especially given the fact that it is commonly assumed to have vanished from the spoken language centuries earlier, rendering it an exogeneous form that had to be acquired through explicit instruction
Summary
Historical metalinguistic discourse is known to often prescribe linguistic variants that are not very frequent in actual language use, and to proscribe frequent variants. With respect to the official Dutch language policy of the early nineteenth century, Krogull et al (2017) argue that the 1805 grammar of Dutch did not exert a strong influence on the use of relative pronouns in a corpus of historical Dutch of the time. Krogull (2018a, 2018b) and Rutten et al (2020), show that a strong influence of the official norms can be assumed for various orthographic variables This may mean that there is a difference between (not so effective) grammatical and (possibly highly influential) orthographic prescriptions, but we hypothesise that the level of social awareness may interfere: contrary to the relativisers discussed by Krogull et al (2017), the genitive case has been a core topic in the Dutch grammatical tradition from the sixteenth century onwards.
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