Leading language change: precept versus practice of strong verbs in Early Modern Dutch

Abstract The start of the standardization of Dutch in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, with its codification in spelling guides, grammars and dictionaries, has been extensively studied. Less well-studied, however, is whether and how these early normative works affected language use at the time. This study explores this question in a case study focussing on strong verbs from the third ablaut class in 17th-century Dutch. Analysing both a corpus of normative grammars – precept – from the time period, as well as usage data – practice – from a Dutch 17th-century newspaper corpus and previously existing data from literary works, private letters and a Bible translation, it shows there are important differences between the two different verb types that fall under ablaut class III, which can be attributed to the differences in timing of their changes as well as the class size and token frequencies of the verbs that fall under the two types. Overall, however, normative influence is shown to be unlikely for this language phenomenon: the norms were lagging behind, rather than leading language change. Rather, the results indicate that the genre of newspapers may have been leading this change by example.