as agricultural day laborers and mercenary soldiers in the Dutch Republic and the ever increasing popularity of "Nederlandsch" and "Nederduytsch" over "Duytsch", the use of which had already been in decline for over a century, thereby acquiring its current meaning (German) in Dutch. While "Nederduytsch" briefly eclipsed the use of "Nederlandsch" during the 17th century, it always remained a somewhat officious, literary and scholarly term among the general populace and steadily started to lose ground to "Nederlandsch" in print after 1700. When, in 1815, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands was proclaimed, it was specifically noted that the official language of the kingdom was "Nederlandsch" and that the Dutch Reformed Church, as the official State Church, would be known as the "Nederlandsch Hervormde Kerk" resulting in a profound drop in the already declining use of the word. The Dutch-speaking Cape Colony came under British control two years prior in 1814, resulting in the continued use of "nederduytsch" by the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa in its official nomenclature to the present day. The disappearance of "Nederduytsch", left "Nederlandsch", first documented in the 15th century, as the sole ethnonym for the Dutch language. The graph below visualises the decline of "Duytsch" and rise and decline of "Nederduytsch" as an ethnonym and the eventual dominance of "Nederlands": In the late 19th century "Nederduits" was reintroduced to Dutch through the German language, where prominent linguists, such as the Brothers Grimm and Georg Wenker, in the nascent field of German and Germanic studies used the term to refer to Germanic dialects which had not taken part in the High German consonant shift. Initially this group consisted of Dutch, English, Low German and Frisian, but in modern scholarship only refers to Low German-varieties. Hence in contemporary Dutch, "Nederduits" is used to describe Low German varieties, specifically those spoken in Northern Germany as the varieties spoken in the eastern Netherlands, while related, are referred to as "Nedersaksisch". Likewise in the 19th century, the term "Diets" was revived by Dutch linguists and historians as a poetic name for Middle Dutch and its literature. Semantic development within German The second recorded use of "theodisca" as a reference to a Germanic language was Old High German. In 788, the Annals of the Frankish Kingdom report the punishment of a Bavarian duke: "quod theodisca lingua herisliz dictum", meaning "known in the language of the people as herisliz". Herisliz is