Regionale variatie in Middelnederlandse spellingsystemen

In this article I will focus on the dialect implications on vowel spelling in the 14th Century, which is before the onset of (spelling) standardisation processes that were spurred on by the development of printing. Central in my research is the question what historical sounds can be represented by the graphemes in use in nine cities. My method involves analysing and cataloguing grapheme-phoneme relationships of a selection of tokens taken from the fourteenth Century charter corpus CRM (Corpus Van Reenen – Mulder). More precisely, I want to find out to what extent vowel graphemes convey phonetic variation accurately across the regions.