accusativism

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noun

The use of originally accusative forms of pronouns, adjectives, articles, etc., in the nominative.

Scrabble 21

Meanings

nounaccusativism (uncountable)
  1. DutchuncountabledialectologyThe use of originally accusative forms of pronouns, adjectives, articles, etc., in the nominative.

    The use of the adnominal accusativism, finally, also displays linguistic hybridity, since both forms like de (standard variant since 1844) and den (older form and regional) are present in the letters of our corpus.

    2016, Jill Puttaert, “Linguistic hybridity in nineteenth-century lower-class letters: A case study from Bruges”, in Reading and writing from below. Exploring the margins of modernity, →ISBN, page 231
    2 more examples

    Table 1 shows the results of our corpus study. We can see that, in the cases of the diphthongs, the long vowels, and accusativism, the variants perceived as Northern are dominant across the board, even as early as 1823, which in many localities was the first time in decades that these sorts of document were being produced in Dutch.

    2012, Rik Vosters, Gijsbert Rutten, Marijke van der Wal, and Wim Vandenbussche, “Spelling and identity in the Southern Netherlands (1750–1830)”, in Alexandra Jaffe, Jannis Androutsopoulos, Mark Sebba and Sally Johnson, editors, Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power, →DOI, pages 149–150

    Examples of accusativism are very common in present-day dialects in Belgium, in dialects spoken in the Southern parts of the Netherlands, as well as in Southern supraregional or regiolectal speech (Goossens 2008: 137–47).

    2015, Rik Vosters and Gijsbert Rutten, “Three Southern shibboleths: Spelling features as conflicting identity markers in the Low Countries”, in Written Language & Literacy, volume 18, number 2, →DOI, page 264

Origin

  1. Dutchaccusativisme
  2. Englishaccusativism

From accusative + -ism. Calque of Dutch accusativisme.

Full word history & related roots →
Cite this entry
APA

accusativism. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/accusativism

MLA

“accusativism.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/accusativism. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “accusativism,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/accusativism.

Source: accusativism on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.