‘Whilst the Statenvertaling did influence a few fixed expressions, it did not determine the wider use of the language,’ explains De Vos. ‘In fact, the translation contains many words and constructions that were gradually disappearing during that period.’ Researchers have therefore long been examining the question of how the standard language did, in fact, spread throughout the Netherlands.
Dialects
Before the seventeenth century, there was no standard Dutch vernacular; instead, Dutch consisted of a collection of regional dialects collectively known as Middle Dutch. By the end of the sixteenth century, there was a growing need for a standard language. De Vos: ‘The printing press, for example, made it possible to distribute texts on a large scale. At the same time, migration led to a mixing of dialects in towns. People could no longer always understand one another, and so the need for a common language grew.’
During that period, the first spelling guides, grammars and dictionaries appeared. Thus, the rules that this standard Dutch language should follow were devised from above. The question is how those language rules found their way into the everyday speech of ordinary Dutch people.
Newspapers as a mass medium
Cultural-historical research has shown that newspapers were an integral part of daily life in the Republic. De Vos: ‘In the Netherlands, a relatively large number of people could read: around sixty per cent of men and forty per cent of women. Moreover, newspapers were affordable and widely available. Newspapers were so ubiquitous that they feature in seventeenth-century paintings, songs and letters. There are even surviving sermons by ministers complaining that their congregations read the newspaper more often than the Bible. So the Statenvertaling may well have been read less than the newspaper.’ As such, newspapers were the ideal medium for disseminating the rules set out in the first Dutch grammar books.
Norm versus usage
Thanks to hundreds of volunteers who have transcribed all the seventeenth-century newspapers from Delpher, this could now be investigated for the first time using the Couranten Corpus (Institute for the Dutch Language). De Vos examined four grammatical constructions to see which rules had been established for them, and whether these were actually applied in the newspapers. This usually turned out not to be the case. The rule for the use of hen and hun, for example – the same rule we still learn today, which stipulates that you must say ‘ik geef hun een boek’ but ‘de leraar beloonde hen’ – was formulated as early as 1625, but was not followed in the newspapers throughout the seventeenth century.
De Vos noticed that newspapers were often relatively consistent in their language use. ‘For the verb “to sing”, for example, the rules often still permitted the old past tense form “zang”, whereas in the more than 6,000 newspapers I examined, it occurs only three times. Almost without exception, newspapers use the form with “o” more than 8,000 times.’ Grammars allowed for greater variation, and in other text types, such as literary works, a wider range of forms of the same word also appeared. ‘Perhaps those newspapers did, after all, play a pioneering role in promoting more uniform language use,’ says De Vos.