Meanings
- 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 2312 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 149–150Examples 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
- Dutchaccusativisme
- Englishaccusativism
From accusative + -ism. Calque of Dutch accusativisme.
More words from Dutch
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
accusativism. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/accusativism
“accusativism.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/accusativism. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “accusativism,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/accusativism.
Source: accusativism on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.