History of Dutch orthography

The history of Dutch orthography covers the changes in spelling of Dutch both in the Netherlands itself and in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in Belgium.

The Dutch spoken between 1150 and 1500 is referred to as Middle Dutch. During this period there was no standardization of grammar. Authors generally wrote in their own dialects. Very often it is possible to tell from the language whether a text comes from Limburg, Brabant, or Holland. There was a lot of variation in the spelling. Words were often written as they were pronounced: lant (land), hi vint (he finds). The sound determined the spelling, irrespective of the basic word. This is no longer the case with modern Dutch, where land is still pronounced [lant] but spelt to conform with the plural landen, and hij vindt (he finds) (still [vint]) has both d of the infinitive (vinden) and the 3rd person singular ending t.

From the very start of its written history, Dutch used the Latin alphabet. At first there were 23 letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, v, x, y, z. It was not until later that the j, u, and w were added.

A problem with the Latin alphabet was that it was not easy to make a distinction between long and short vowels (a / aa). Various solutions were found. At the beginning of the 13th century the word jaar (year) was spelt jar but other variants soon appeared: jaer and jair and later jaar or even yaer and iaer.

Another feature of Middle Dutch is that articles or prepositions were often joined onto the word they belonged to: tjaer (the year) and dlant (the land), as in the accompanying fragment from Karel ende Elegast. The text translates: “I will tell you a marvelous story, and a true one. Listen! One evening Charles was sleeping in Ingelheim on the Rhine. All the land you could see was his.”

There were also regional differences. Thus a clerk in Amsterdam in the 14th century would usually write lant, but one in Utrecht would write land.

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