This paper argues that the Dutch sociolinguistic situation in the 17th and 18th centuries should be analyzed as diaglossic, that is, involving a wide spectrum of variation in between localized spoken dialects and the supposed written standard. In fact, multiple instances of norm selection for writing render this diaglossic situation even more complex. The paper shows that multiple norm selection even occurred in cases when a strict and simple norm was selected early on, that is, in the late 16th–early 17th century. The case study is based on the Letters as Loot Corpus comprising private letters from the 1660s–1670s and the 1770s–1780s and focuses on the object form of the 1st person singular personal pronoun, namely, mij or mijn. Despite the early selection of mij, some language users in the late 17th and 18th century adopted mijn in writing. The analysis shows a normative split in written Dutch of the time, with most language users either converging to or diverging from the supposed standard form mij.*

Whereas object pronouns regularly occurred before the main verb in Old and early Middle English, such word orders were to a large extent lost in Middle English prose by the end of the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, some isolated later texts still show regular preverbal occurrences of object pronouns. Such word orders are most frequent with three texts that are translations of French sources. This article closely examines one of these texts, the Middle English prose Brut, and its source, and argues that contact influence is the most plausible explanation for its distinct behaviour with respect to object pronoun placement. It is also shown that the translator does not slavishly follow his source and that the contact effects are mainly of the statistical type in that word orders occurring very marginally in other texts appear with high frequencies in the Brut while such a contrast is not found for a word order that is unattested elsewhere. These observations are compatible with the equally exceptional but slightly different distribution of object pronouns in another translation from French, the Ayenbite of Inwyt. The findings of this article show that translation-induced contact and, possibly, contact in bilingual language use more generally can have important quantitative effects and that these have to be seriously considered in any syntactic analysis of historical texts based on a foreign source text.