The nineteenth century saw a dramatic expansion of print, with debates on its effect on linguistic “complexity” often focusing on literary simplification – i.e., shorter sentences, more accessible vocabulary, and convergent stylistic norms – while journalistic and scientific prose may have remained stable or even complexifying. We ask whether comparable patterns are detectable in nineteenth-century Danish newspapers, using a corpus of ~5 million articles (1677–1849), categorized as National news, International news, Advertisements, and Fiction, including serialized narratives. This is a work in progress, where preliminary results of a randomly sampled subset (~200,000 articles) are presented.

Complexity is measured via surface and shallow syntactic features (sentence and word length, lexical diversity) supplemented with features capturing narrative style and syntactic structure. Preliminary analyses indicate domain-structured change: Fiction and International news show the clearest diachronic trends, while aggregate signals are weak. Sentence length declines in Fiction and Advertisements, word length rises across all domains, and lexical diversity increases selectively.

Linear regression predicting publication year performs poorly overall, improving modestly per domain. Our genre-aware pipeline suggests that, rather than general shifts in Danish, international influences may have shaped Fiction, connecting Scandinavian print history to broader European debates on the rise in print, literacy, media, and stylistic change.