Data-driven Morphology and Sociolinguistics for Early Modern Dutch

Abstract

The advent of Early Modern Dutch (starting ∼1550) marked significant developments in language use in the Netherlands. Examples include the loss of the case marking system, the loss of negative particles and the introduction of new vocabulary. These developments typically lead to a lot of variation both within and between language users. Linguistics research aims to characterize and account for such variation patterns. Due to sparseness of digital resources and tools, research is still dependent on traditional, qualitative analysis. This paper describes an ongoing effort to increase the amount of tools and resources, exploring two different routes: (i) modernization of historical language and (ii) adding linguistic and sociolinguistic annotations to historical language directly. This paper discusses and compares the experimental setup, and preliminary results of these two routes and provides an outlook on the envisioned linguistic and sociolinguistic research approach.