De indeling van de dialecten in Noord-Limburg en het aangrenzende Duitse gebied

Abstract

Abstract Mapping dialects in North-Limburg and the adjacent German region. How relevant is the Uerdinger line as dividing line? The Uerdingen isogloss is claimed to define the border between the Kleverlandish and South Lower Franconian dialect areas, both in the Netherlands and Germany. In earlier research we concluded that the border between these two dialect areas had to be reduced to other isoglosses. In this study we aim to give a definite answer on the basis of the Wenker survey data. As in our earlier studies, we applied the strategy of selecting the dialect variants of the most common words on both sides of the state border. We again applied two research methods in computing linguistic distances, one based on carefully classifying linguistic features, the other one based on string distances. The results turned out to converge. We found two dialect areas in Germany and three in the Netherlands. The Uerdinger line was not a main dialect border, on either side of the state border. We found breaks in the old dialect continuum crossing the state border. On the Dutch side a middle zone has appeared that could emerge because of the state border of 1815. The result is that the border of the Kleverlandish and South Franconian dialect areas runs more to the north in the Netherlands.