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Development of Dutch Orthography 1250-1400 (DoDO)
Main researcher: Chris De Wulf
Funding: UZH, SNSF
The main scope of the project proposed here is the description of unguided (not-steered) development of writing systems for West Germanic dialects based on the Latin alphabet. It will render this from diatopic and diachronic grapheme research on Middle Dutch local charters.
The project focuses on the period before Early Modern Dutch and the standardisation processes, and ask the question: "How do scribes cope in writing with the Latin alphabet in their dialects when there is no prescribed standard?” To answer this, the writings of scribes who operate in local writing systems, i.e. written dialect, need to be considered, and this should be done with manuscripts, e.g. handwritten administrative texts of local importance only, such as local charters.
As the main deliverable the project will provide an open access and electronically published diachronic grapheme atlas with commentary.
Dialect contact and standardization in sixteenth-century Antwerp
Main researcher: Julie Van Ongeval (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Supervision: Rik Vosters, Bart Lambert, Chris De Wulf
Funding: FWO Flanders
While standardization has traditionally been described as a top-down process of normative pressure from above, recent empirical research shows that standard languages are more likely to emerge in the everyday language use of the wider population through bottom-up processes of dialect contact. For Dutch, such a bottom-up perspective has only been confirmed for the seventeenth-century Northern Netherlands, leaving the contribution of the South in this process completely underexposed. To fill this important empirical blind spot in the Dutch language history, this project will focus on the role of dialect contact in sixteenth-century Antwerp. Using a corpus of ego-documents and administrative texts, we will more precisely conduct three different corpus linguistic studies. The first two case studies will examine the impact of the social context on the koineization process, by zooming in on the socially disruptive Fall of Antwerp from both a macro- and a microscopic perspective. The final sub-study will explore to what extent standardization is driven by top-down and/or bottom-up processes as well as how these two fundamentally different processes relate to each other. The combination of these case studies will allow us to measure the success of bottom-up standardization against its broader sociolinguistic background.
Klankatlas van het veertiende-eeuwse Middelnederlands. Het dialectvocalisme in lokale oorkonden. (Phonological Atlas of Fourteenth Century Middle Dutch)
Publication Link
INPOLDER (Parsing of North-Eastern Middle Dutch administrative and legal texts)
Information Link
Databank van veertiende‐eeuwse niet‐literaire Nederlandse teksten. Opbouw en linguïstisch onderzoek
Database Link
Editie van autografische Middelnederlandse egodocumenten als basis voor historische dialect‐ en idiolectgrammatica's
Information Link
Fonologische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten (Phonological Atlas of the Dutch Dialects)
Publication Link
Korpuslinguistik, Dialektologie, Mittelniederländisch, Phonologie, Graphematik
