From Late Middle Dutch to Early New Dutch: the influence of the printing press on the standardization of written Dutch.

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This research project deals with the history of the standardization of written Dutch that in major aspects has to be reconsidered. The overall aim of the project is to investigate the influence of the technological innovation of the printing press, an invention that changed cultural history, on the standardization of written Dutch. It is hypothesized that in printed books supra-regional Dutch was already used at the beginning of the 16th century. So written Dutch was much earlier standardized than was presumed until now. According to the common opinion, Standard Dutch would have developed in Holland at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century during the economical and cultural height of the Golden Age. Although there had been early attempts towards standardization in the 16th century in the southern Low Countries (Brabant), these would not have been successful.However, preliminary research pointed out that already at the very beginning of the 16th century dialectal features in written books had been systematically replaced by supra-regional, Early New Dutch variants. The city of Antwerp (region Brabant), in those days the most important metropolis in the Low Countries, apparently led the way in this process. Also in books printed in Holland the Hollandic dialectal features were early replaced by its supra-regional counterparts. In Flanders and in the northeastern part of the language area (Ijsselregion) the switch from Middle Dutch to Early New Dutch occurred later. The proposed research project has three objectives:1) Determining the shift from Late Middle Dutch to Early New Dutch in printed religious and educational texts through space and time by means of an empirical quantitative and qualitative investigation of the language used in printed books in the above mentioned four areas from the end of the 15th until the end of the 16th century.2) Determining the influence of the printing press on the standardization of Dutch by means of an empirical comparison between the language written in manuscripts versus in printed books (religious and educational texts). In case it turns out that regional Dutch was longer preserved in manuscripts than in printed texts, this finding supports the hypothesis that the invention of the printing press strongly favoured the standardization of written Dutch. 3) Explaining the research results obtained in 1) and 2). How could an implicit language norm arise among mercantile printers, several decades before the outlines of Standard Dutch were codified? Which sociocultural factors favoured the transition from dialectal Late Middle Dutch to supra-regional Early New Dutch as early as the very beginning of the 16th century?