You are what you is: Verbal agreement variation and change in Early Modern Dutch

Anne Breitbarth

doi:10.5117/TNTL2026.1.001.BREI

ISSN: 0040-7550
E-ISSN: 2212-0521

You are what you is

Verbal agreement variation and change in Early Modern Dutch
Author: Anne Breitbarth¹
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¹ Ghent University
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Source: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, Volume 142, Issue 1, Apr 2026, p. 1 - 24
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5117/TNTL2026.1.001.BREI
Language: English
- Published online: 01 Apr 2026

Abstract

Much ink has been spilled over the question how the pronoun u ‘you’ came to be used as a polite form of address in subject function in the history of Dutch, and the role epistolary forms of address played in it. What has so far escaped attention is the form that verbal agreement takes with u. In present-day Dutch, there is variation in verbs that have distinct second and third person forms. The current paper traces the diachronic development of this variation in a corpus of letters from the 17^th and 18^th centuries and argues that the present-day variation is the result of top-down and bottom-up tendencies: the downward spread of upper class (written) forms of address requiring third person agreement and the initial use of the position-dependent agreement system of gij, and analogical pressure against it, from below.

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