Forms of address as politic behaviour in seventeenth-century Dutch private and business letters

Abstract Various characteristics of historical letters, such as formulaic language and forms of address, have been analysed from a politeness perspective (e.g., Bijkerk [2004] and Tiisala [2004] ) and sometimes also explicitly from a sociopragmatic perspective ( Nevala 2004a ). In Rutten and van der Wal (2014) , we analysed Dutch private letters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the many changes occurring in the system of forms of address, which includes both nominal and pronominal forms, can be modelled sociopragmatically, with reference to both sociolinguistic factors and politic behaviour in the sense of Watts (2003) . We also observed differences between the private letters in our corpus and a limited number of business letters that we had at our disposal at the time, and it is this issue that we explore in this paper. On the basis of a recently compiled subset of business letters by seventeenth-century merchants ( van der Wal and Rutten 2024 ), of whom we also have private letters, we first analyse the distribution of forms of address in the business letters against the background of what we know about private letters in general. We then compare qualitatively the use of forms of address in the business letters with private letters by the same writers, focussing on three prolific authors.