An acoustic description of the vowels of northern and southern standard Dutch II: Regional varieties

Abstract

An analysis is presented of regional variation patterns in the vowel system of Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands (Northern Standard Dutch) and Flanders (Southern Standard Dutch). The speech material consisted of read monosyllabic utterances in a neutral consonantal context (i.e., /sVs/). The analyses were based on measurements of the duration and the frequencies of the first two formants of the vowel tokens. Recordings were made for 80 Dutch and 80 Flemish speakers, who were stratified for the social factors gender and region. These 160 speakers were distributed across four regions in the Netherlands and four regions in Flanders. Differences between regional varieties were found for duration, steady-state formant frequencies, and spectral change of formant frequencies. Variation patterns in the spectral characteristics of the long mid vowels /e o ø/ and the diphthongal vowels /ei oey bacwards c u/ were in accordance with a recent theory of pronunciation change in Standard Dutch. Finally, it was found that regional information was present in the steady-state formant frequency measurements of vowels produced by professional language users.