Historical metalinguistic discourse is known to often prescribe linguistic variants that are not very frequent in actual language use, and to proscribe frequent variants. Infrequent variants that are promoted through prescription can be innovations, but they can also be conservative forms that have already largely vanished from the spoken language and are now also disappearing in writing. An extreme case in point is the genitive case in Dutch. This has been in decline in usage from at least the thirteenth century onwards, gradually giving way to analytical alternatives such as prepositional phrases. In the grammatical tradition, however, a preference for the genitive case was maintained for centuries. When 'standard' Dutch is officially codified in 1805 in the context of a national language policy, the genitive case is again strongly preferred, still aiming to 'revive' the synthetic forms. The striking discrepancy between metalinguistic discourse on the one hand, and developments in language use on the other, make the genitive case in Dutch an interesting case for historical sociolinguistics. In this paper, we tackle various issues raised by the research literature, such as the importance of genre differences as well as variation within particular genres, through a detailed corpus-based analysis of the influence of prescription on language practices in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch. In this paper, we tackle various issues raised by the research literature, such as the importance of genre differences as well as variation within particular genres, through a detailed corpus-based analysis of the influence of prescription on language practices in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch. Keywords: Dutch, genitive case, historical sociolinguistics, language planning, prescriptivism status released display-pdf yes is-in-collection-domain yes is-olf no is-manuscript no is-preprint no is-journal-matter no is-scanned no is-retracted no Collection date 2021 Apr 1. 1. Introduction Historical metalinguistic discourse is known to often prescribe linguistic variants that are not very frequent in actual language use, and to proscribe frequent variants. An example of the former is the proposal made by the seventeenth-century German grammarian Schottelius to adopt <kk> instead of <ck> in words such as wecken ‘to wake’ ( McLelland 2014 : 266–267). An example of the latter is preposition stranding as in who are you talking to , which was quite common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, and fiercely attacked by some eighteenth-century grammarians ( Yáñez-Bouza 2015 ). Against the background of the newly developed standard language ideology, which came into existence as the linguistic counterpart of the wider phenomenon of cultural nationalism ( Rutten 2016b ), policy measures aimed to regulate language use in the educational and administrative domains. The Dutch case therefore also allows us to empirically assess the significance of implementation and acceptance in the sense of Haugen (1966 , 1987) , which have not attracted the amount of historical-sociolinguistic attention they deserve (cf. Rutten et al. 2020 ). In section 2 , we describe the historical-sociolinguistic context of the present research, focusing on eighteenth-century nationalism, and the official language planning efforts it gave rise to in the Netherlands. Section 3 discusses the genitive case and other genitival constructions in the history of Dutch, concentrating on the linguistic changes over time as well as on the metalinguistic discourse accompanying these changes. In section 4 , we introduce our historical corpus and how we used it for this study. Section 5 comprises the results, followed by the discussion in section 6 . 2. Language played an increasingly important part in cultural-nationalist discourses in the second half of the eighteenth century ( Rutten 2016b ). In tandem with the equally increasing call for linguistic uniformity, this period saw the emergence of modern standard language ideology ( Milroy and Milroy 2012 ; Lippi-Green 2012 ; Rutten 2016b , 2019 ). In line with the strong educational focus of the Dutch Enlightenment, emphasis was also placed on the need for a national school system, which would ensure the transmission of the national language to younger generations ( Rutten 2019 ; Schoemaker 2018 ). Most of these new schoolbooks were founded on the orthography written by Siegenbeek (1804) and the grammar devised by Weiland (1805) , both of which were commissioned by the Minister of National Education. In fact, these two publications were the linguistic heart of the new language and language-in-education policies of the government. Together, they were the concrete outcome of what was called the schrijftaalregeling ‘written language regulation’. The schrijftaalregeling was the governmental effort to create a uniform Dutch language, primarily in writing, which was to be used However, the developments in language practice call for a more fine-grained analysis, which is why we examine a range of internal and external factors in this section. First, we address the role of context. In line with earlier observations, the results in Table 5 , based on our Going Dutch Corpus data, indicate a considerable amount of context-related variation. Table 5: Distribution across context between Period 1 and Period 2. deelen ‘share’ versus geven ‘give’). From this we can conclude that the effectiveness of linguistic prescriptions on language practice needs to be assessed on at least two distinct levels, viz. orthography and grammar (cf. Rutkowska and Rössler 2012 : 213). While this might not be an entirely surprising conclusion as such, our findings are based on reliable empirical data drawn from a large-scale corpus of historical Dutch, showing that grammatical issues are much less sensible to top-down policy measures than orthography, and often further conditioned by both internal and external factors.