Non-native communication in eighteenth-century maritime circles

Abstract

In this paper, I intend to analyze, from a historical sociolinguistic perspective, the characteristics of Dutch letters written by economic migrants in the late eighteenth century. These letters, which are part of the Leiden Letters as Loot corpora, were confiscated by the English during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and the American War of Independence (1776–1784). After presenting the method of finding such non-native communication, the linguistic complexity of the letter writers’ regions of origin will be discussed. Focusing on letter writers from the North Frisian islands and East Frisia, their command of Dutch will be determined by examining both deviating features and two Dutch phenomena, the epistolary forms of address and the first person singular object (or oblique) pronouns. Different levels of Dutch proficiency can be attributed to biographical details and may also lead to hypotheses for subsequent research of letter writers of German and Scandinavian origin.