The Formation and Dissolution of a Written Language A Digital Analysis of the Low German Writing Tradition on 18th-Century Amager

This book investigates the formation, development, and dissolution of a Low German writing tradition in the Dutch community on 18th-century Amager. Drawing on a corpus of school catechisms and related texts, it applies a digitally supported graphematic framework combined with statistical analysis and phylogenetic modelling to reconstruct and compare historical writing systems. The study demonstrates that the community’s orthographic practices were not uniform but consisted of distinct, structurally independent systems.<br/>By situating these findings within their historical and sociolinguistic context, the book shows how institutional practices - especially in education and religious instruction - shaped the transmission and stability of written norms. It further argues that the introduction of a new orthographic model in the late 18th century may have disrupted this continuity and contributed to the decline of the tradition. More broadly, the study advances graphematic methodology by integrating computational and quantitative approaches, offering new tools for the analysis of premodern writing systems and language change.