For my dissertation, I have collected a corpus with historical Dutch texts taken from the period 1250 to 2000, thus spanning a major part of the history of Dutch. The corpus brings together historical texts from different text collections in a methodologically motivated sample, and is therefore called the Compilation Corpus Historical Dutch.
The compilation corpus consists of two subcorpora in which each subcorpus covers a part of the history of Dutch and represents one type of specific language use. The subcorpus of chancellery texts (1250-1800) aims to represent the regionally coloured language use typical of the written language of the Middle Ages and contains a selection of local chancellery texts from the three dialect regions Flanders, Brabant and Holland. The subcorpus of narrative texts (1575-2000) aims to give a balanced representation of the written language use in Holland from the end of the sixteenth century to the present day. The balanced composition of the compilation corpus enables the user to follow language changes uninterruptedly in time and space from the earliest Dutch to the present day. The corpus contains in total around 600 000 words.
The corpus is freely available for scientific research. Send a mail to evie (dot) cousse (at) gu (dot) se to get a copy of the corpus.
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