The National Archives ( Kew, UK) keep a treasure that causes real excitement among scholars: the recently rediscovered collection of  Dutch documents from the second half of the 17th to the early 19th centuries, comprising over 38,000, both commercial and private, letters. These so-called sailing letters were confiscated during the wars fought between The Netherlands and England.

What makes this huge collection of letters so interesting for linguists are the 15,000 private letters, written by men, women and even children of all social ranks, including the lower and middle classes. They offer an unprecedented opportunity to gain access to the everyday and colloquial language of the past.

The research programme Letters as loot. Towards a non-standard view on the history of Dutch aims at exploring this extraordinary and highly valuable source for a new history of Dutch. The groundbreaking research will lead to a thorough revision of the traditional views of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch, which are largely based on analyses of published, mostly literary texts produced by professional – male – writers belonging to the higher social classes from the province of Holland. 

The project comprises three sub-projects. Two cross-sections are made in the source material at a chronological distance of about hundred years: the first of the period 1665-1674 (2nd and 3rd Anglo-Dutch Wars) and the second of the period 1776-1784 (4th Anglo-Dutch War and American War of Independence).

With these cross-sections two PhD-projects correspond: Everyday Dutch of the lower and middle classes. Private letters in times of war (1665-1674), dealing with a period characterized by linguistic variety alongside developing uniformity, and A perspective from below. Private letters versus printed uniformity (1776-1784), dealing with a period of uniformity in the written printed language. In the third subproject Filling the gaps: rewriting the history of Dutch we will compare the results from the two different periods and we will evaluate our approach of the sailing letters. This subproject will result in a monograph written by the post-doc and the project leader. 

The linguistic data will be analyzed from a socio-historical perspective, which will allow us to present a more complete view of the history of Dutch than ever before. By looking at the letters from the perspective of the language history from below we will be able to fill major gaps in our linguistic knowledge of  the past. Thus nowadays the confiscated sailing letters offer amazing perspectives that previously linguists could only have dreamt of.