On Dutch thrift

An experiment using DBNL Ngram Viewer

People from Zeeland are thrifty, people from Holland are misers. It is common knowledge that saving comes natural to the Dutch: Dutch (Calvinist) culture prescribes frugality and denounces ‘big spending’. Whether the Dutch are really that thrifty, and if so, what the origins are, is difficult to determine though. Did a ‘protestant ethic’ make us frugal, as the famous German sociologist Max Weber suggested? Did we become thrifty after the Reformation, encouraged by protestant ministers and moralizing authors?

Using new digital techniques – the so-called digital humanities – it might be possible to say a few things about this. Internet giant Google offers its users the possibility to study the use of words in its enormous corpus of many centuries of digitized literature. Unfortunately, this service only covers the world languages – and not Dutch.

The Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL) now offers a similar service though: searching more than five centuries of digitized Dutch language writings using its DBNL Ngram Viewer. As a small experiment I have entered sparen (saving) including spelling varieties (such as spaarde and spaarden, but also old-Dutch spelling such as spaerde and spaerden).

The nice thing about ‘saving’ in Dutch is that it has a limited meaning: to avoid spending as an economic strategy – although a second, archaic meaning is ‘sparing’, for instance of suffering. In English language ‘saving’ is more complex: it can mean avoiding spending, but also to economize (saving on a purchase), and to bring to safety. Also, Dutch language only has a limited number of synonyms for ‘saving’: opzijleggen is only found 14 times in five centuries of literature covered by DBNL Ngram Viewer, oppotten only 160 times. To put this in perspective: sparen is found more than 38.000 times. The results are shown below.

The figure shows for every year how often sparen is used compared to other words used in the same year. In blue annual relative frequencies, in black ten-year moving averages.

The use of sparen seems fairly stable throughout the centuries. Until the nineteenth century the term was frequently used in Dutch language literature, with a relative frequency of about 0,040. In the twentieth century its use dropped to 0,025, and considering the score of 0,018 for 2001-2014, it seems this downward trend continues.

The figure shows a remarkable peak after the Reformation: until the Iconoclasm of 1566 the relative frequency was 0,030, but after this until the end of the Dutch Revolt in 1648 it was 0,046. Sparen was used most often by authors in the period of c. 1585-c. 1605. Was this the result of an increase in the production of religious writings, describing how God ‘spares’ individuals from a terrible fate? Was it the result of an emerging Protestantism that – in the vein of Max Weber – propagated saving behaviour? Or was it the general crisis caused by warfare that brought writers to call for thrift? And even then: what does the popularity of term sparen in literature tell us about saving in daily practise?

Such questions are as of yet difficult to answer. This is in part due to the lack of late-medieval literature in DBNL Ngram Viewer, which makes it difficult to place sixteenth-century developments in a broader context. Another problem concerns the impossibility to select the regions where literature was published – for instance protestant and catholic areas, or Dutch and Flemish areas. On the other hand it is clear that new digital techniques allow scholars to study the past in a completely new way. And perhaps best of all: digital humanities give writers center stage, and allow us to study how they engaged with economy and society. In a time of questions about the value of humanities, and threats of severe budget cuts, this may prove to be a development of crucial importance.