Dutch Dialects Research Articles

The Belgian Limburg dialect of Hamont

Hamont is a small town located on the north-eastern edge of the Belgian province of Limburg, on the national border with the Netherlands. It is situated about 30 km south of Eindhoven and 15 km west of Weert in the Netherlands. The town has about 13,500 inhabitants. According to Belemans, Kruijsen & Van Keymeulen (1998), the dialect of Hamont belongs to the West Limburg dialects (subclassification: Dommellands). Limburg dialects occupy a unique position among the Belgian and Dutch dialects in that their prosodic system has a lexical tone distinction, which is traditionally referred to as SLEEPTOON ‘dragging tone’ and STOOTTOON ‘push tone’. In line with recent conventions, stoottoon is referred to as Accent 1 and transcribed as superscript 1; sleeptoon is referred to as Accent 2 and is transcribed as superscript 2 (cf. Schmidt 1986).

The typology of syncretisms and the status of feature structure. Verbal paradigms across 355 Dutch dialects

In this article syncretic patterning in the present indicative paradigm of the verb kloppen (‘to knock’) is described for 355 Dutch dialects taken from the morphological atlas of Dutch dialects (Van den Berg 2003). Following Baerman et al. (2005, The syntax-morphology interface. A study of syncretism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), I distinguish syncretisms driven by (universal) feature structure and language specific sources of syncretism. I present independent evidence for the role of phonology, pragmatics and amplification in the formation of syncretic patterns of Dutch. The benefit of the study of the interaction between language specific routes to syncretism and feature structure is threefold. We know language specific routes to syncretism can obscure feature structure. By distinguishing the different routes to syncretism we canalsorevealthe strength of feature structure. Secondly, distinguishing sources of syncretisms enables us to understand similarities and differences in the cross-linguistic patterning of syncretisms. Thirdly, we can link typological data to language acquisition patterns.

Variation in verbal inflection in Dutch dialects

From a diachronic perspective, Germanic languages are in the process of deflection. In this context, there appears to be a rather chaotic amount of variation within the verbal inflectional paradigms of Dutch dialects. Based on the paradigms of the verb leven (“to live”) in 253 Dutch dialects, we provide a description and a paradigmatic analysis of the variation that we found in verbal inflection in geographically determined, synchronic varieties of Dutch. It turns out that the observed variation is remarkably consistent: there are nine different paradigms, eight of which show a geographically delimited distribution. We discuss the observed geographical variation in the context of Germanic deflection. We argue that variation and deflection are determined by paradigmatic simplification of the feature system involved. We demonstrate that the following economy strategies are relevant: (A) the reduction of the number of distinctive features for a particular affix in an inflectional paradigm: each affix within the Dutch verbal inflectional system is characterized by one phi-feature only; (B) the introduction of a default category [+finite]; (C) the reduction of the number of feature categories in an inflectional paradigm: Dutch inflectional paradigms allow the presence of only one inflectional category ([number], [person], [gender]). These strategies largely determine the realm of variation, within which regional varieties occupy different positions. By doing so, we provide a perspective on paradigmatic change, triggered by properties of the language system.

The Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects

This paper discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of the various choices we had to make in order to realize the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND) in a relatively short period. The idea is that by presenting the SAND in this way, we enable the ScanDiaSyn project and other new dialect syntax projects to profit from our experience in a similar enterprise. The presentation and explicitation of the choices we had to make, the problems we had to face and the mistakes we have made will not necessarily be the same choices, problems, and mistakes that will arise in the Scandinavian project, but it might give an indication of where problems may be expected and how mistakes may be prevented.

IP-ellipsis in Dutch dialects

A number of Belgian Dutch dialects feature a previously undiscussed construction of the type “X + that-clause”, where X can be an evaluative adjective or a sentential adverb. The adjective expresses the speaker’s opinion about the following that-clause, while the adverb modifies its modality. Some examples: {Jammer/ Goed} da Kris komt(lit. 'regrettable/good that Kris comes'), or Misschien da Jessica het haar verteld heeft (lit. 'perhaps that Jessica it her told has'). I argue that this construction involves a type of IP-ellipsis whereby a copular verb, the expletive subject 'het' (‘it’) and in some cases the dummy predicate 'zo' (‘so, the case’) have been elided. The underlying structures of the examples above are the following: Het is jammer/goed da Kris komt (lit. 'it is regrettable/good that Kris comes' and Het is misschien zo da Jessica het haar verteld heeft (lit. 'it is perhaps the.case that Jessica it her told has')

Measuring Syntactic Variation in Dutch Dialects

This research applies dialectometric methods to purely syntactic dialect data. It will be shown that there is geographic cohesion in syntactic variation when viewed in the aggregate. The amount of syntactic variation which can be accounted for by geography will be determined. Dialectometric techniques will be used to develop an additive measure of syntactic differences. Multidimensional scaling will be applied to visualise the geographic distribution of the Dutch dialects with respect to syntactic variation in the aggregate. The Dutch dialect map based on a syntactic measure will be compared with a dialect map based on subjective judgements and a dialect map based on pronunciation differences to put the syntactic measurement results into perspective. An alternative way to measure syntactic distance will be presented and will provide indications for future research to more accurately quantify syntactic variation.

Enhancing the durational enhancement of a tone contrast

In central and low Franconian dialects of German and Dutch, a lexical tone contrast (accent 1 versus accent 2) exists that is enhanced by a durational difference. While pitch differences vary according to intonation and sentence context, syllables are generally shorter when they have accent 1. In addition, vowels in those syllables are more open, in comparison with vowels in syllables with accent 2. Perception experiments with natural vowels whose acoustic durations had been manipulated revealed that high vowels are perceived as longer by Dutch listeners than midvowels when acoustic durations are equal. It is argued that vowel raising of longer vowels, or vowel lowering of shorter vowels, serves as an enhancement of duration differences. The tendency is widely attested to in the vowel systems of Germanic languages, where short (‘‘lax’’) vowels are opener than long (‘‘tense’’) vowels, and vowel height is used to enhance a phonological duration contrast. In the dialects investigated, vowel height is manipulated to enhance a durational difference, which in turn enhances a tonal contrast. The explanation of the durational illusion of vowel height is the listener’s compensation of the universally shorter duration of higher vowels.

Ontwikkelingen In Het Gebruik Van Streektalen En Dialecten In De Periode 1995-2003

Usage of Dutch regional languages and dialects is very much in decline in favour of usage of standard Dutch. This paper analyses the developments in usage in the period 1995-2003 using data from five measurement points of the national cohort study Primai y Education (PRIMA). A total of 35,000 pupils and their parents were involved in this study. In addition, this paper analyses the relationship between usage of regional languages and dialects on the one hand and a number of family demographical characteristics and the children's Dutch language proficiency on the other. The results show that it is imperative to treat the Netherlands not as a whole but to differentiate between language areas. In contrast to the other regional languages and dialects the future of Limburgish seems less gloomy.

In Dutch? Usage of Dutch Regional Languages and Dialects

This paper examines the use of regional languages and dialects of Dutch in the Netherlands, and the relation of such to the Dutch language proficiency of primary school pupils. The data from the large-scale primary education PRIMA cohort study are analysed. A total of nearly 35,000 pupils participated in five measurement rounds covering the period 1995 through 2003. Insight is thus provided into the most recent situation and the developments during this period. Two developments stood out in particular. A considerable intergenerational decrease in the use of regional languages and dialects within families, on the one hand, and across years, on the other hand. Only a weak relation between the use of regional languages and dialects and Dutch language proficiency is detected, moreover. The conclusions do not hold for each and every regional language and dialect studied here. The position of Limburgish proved interesting in particular.

Low Saxon possessive pronominals

: (1) a mijn-(*e) boeken my books b. de mijn-*(e) the my-infl If we look at traditional dialects of Dutch, in particular those of the northern and eastern regions of the Netherlands – a group of dialects sometimes referred to as Low-Saxon – we observe that the substantively used possessives take a markedly different shape. Consider the following paradigm, from the Groningen dialect, as an example (Ter Laan 1953): (2) attributive use substantive use: a. mien a.’ mienent my/mine

Classifying Dutch dialects using a syntactic measure

Classifying Dutch dialects using a syntactic measure

How well can Norwegians identify their dialects?

The aim of the present study is twofold. First, it addresses the question of how well Norwegians are able to identify Norwegian dialects. Second, it investigates the role which intonation plays in the identification of Norwegian dialects. In a number of listening experiments, 15 groups of young Norwegians from different parts of Norway were asked to identify 15 different dialects. The dialects were presented in the original form as well as in a version that was manipulated by computer in such a way that the intonation was removed. In this way it was possible to see how important intonation is for the identification of the dialects. The results are put into perspective by comparing them to results of similar experiments with Dutch dialects. Norwegians turned out to be less good at recognizing Norwegian dialects than Dutchmen. Linguistic and extra-linguistic explanations are given. Furthermore the results show that intonation is more important for the identification of Norwegian dialects than for the identification of Dutch dialects.

Perceptive evaluation of Levenshtein dialect distance measurements using Norwegian dialect data

The Levenshtein dialect distance method has proven to be a successful method for measuring phonetic distances between Dutch dialects. The aim of the present investigation is to validate the Levenshtein dialect distance with perceptual data from a language area other than the Dutch, namely Norway. We calculate the correlation between the Levenshtein distances and the distances between 15 Norwegian dialects as judged by Norwegian listeners. We carry out this analysis to see the degree to which the average Levenshtein distances correspond to the psychoacoustic perception of the speakers of the dialects. The present article reports on part of a study supported by NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. We are grateful for the permission from Kristian Skarbo and Jorn Almberg to use their material and for the help of Jorn Almberg during the whole investigation. We thank Saakje van Dellen for her obliging help with the data entry and Peter Kleiweg for letting us use the programs that he developed for the visualization of the maps and dendrograms in this article. Finally, we would like to thank John Nerbonne for valuable comments and for correcting our English.

The use of the Almeida-Braun system in the measurement of Dutch dialect distances

Measuring dialect distances can be based on the comparison of words, and the comparison words should be based on the comparison of sounds. In this research we used an adjusted version of an articulation-based system, developed by Almeida and Braun (1986) for finding sound distances, using the IPA system. For comparison of two pronunciations of a word corresponding with two different varieties, we used the Levenshtein algorithm, which finds the easiest way in which one word can be changed into the other by inserting, deleting or substituting sounds. As operations weights of these three operations we used distances as found with the Almeida & Braun system. The dialect distance is now equal to the average of a range of word distances. We applied the technique to 360 Dutch dialects. The transcriptions of 125 words for each dialect are taken from the Reeks Nederlandse Dialectatlassen (Blancquaert and Pee, 1925-1982). We get a division with clear similarities to traditional dialect maps when classifying dialects. Using logarithmic sound distances improves results compared to results based on constant sound distances.

Language Varieties and Educational Achievement of Indigenous Primary School Pupils

This paper explores the relations between standard-language and arithmetic test performance and a range of language-related family characteristics in the Netherlands. The sample consists of 7730 pupils from nearly 700 primary schools. The variables analysed are: the language variety the child chooses in conversations with its father, mother, siblings and friends; the language the parents communicate in; the importance the parents attach to their home language; the parents' command of standard-Dutch; the parents' educational level; the child's gender; the province. The main question is whether pupils who use standard-Dutch perform better than pupils who generally speak another language variety, i.e. a Dutch dialect or Frisian. The results show that only the parents' educational level and the province are relevant in explaining differences in standard-Dutch and arithmetic test results. Most remarkable are the results from Limburg and Friesland. On average the children from both provinces speak non-Dutch in 47% of the language domains. Yet the pupils from Limburg perform best and the pupils from Friesland worst on the standard-Dutch and arithmetic test, even after controlling for the family characteristics. Within these groups there are no differences between the pupils who generally speak Dutch and the pupils who generally speak a Limburg dialect or Frisian.

The phonology of tone and intonation in the Dutch dialect of Venlo

The Dutch dialect of Venlo has a lexical tone opposition comparable to the distinction between Accent I and Accent II in Scandinavian. The two word tone patterns are realised in a variety of different ways, depending on the intonation contour, on whether the word has a focus tone, and on whether it occurs finally or nonfinally in the intonational phrase (IP). Twelve such contexts are identified, and an autosegmental-metrical analysis is presented of the contours for the word tones in each of these. The analysis is instructive because of its clear illustration of the distinction between the phonological underlying representation and the phonological surface representation, as well as of the distinction between the latter representation and the phonetic realisation. In addition, because of the complexity of its tonal phonology, the dialect is of considerable typological interest for the study of word prosody and intonation.

The Dutch dialect of Weert

En s'appuyant sur les donnees issues de la transcription phonetique d'un passage enregistre aupres d'un locuteur habitant dans un village pres de la ville de Weert (province du Limburg), l'A. propose un inventaire phonematique et prosodique du dialecte neerlandais parle dans cette region

Taaltoestanden Volgens de "Reeks Nederlandse Dialect-atlassen"

The 16-volume "Reeks Nederlandse Dialect-atlassen" - RND (Atlases of Dutch Dialects Series; 1925-1976), which was started by Edgar Blanquaert, is due of the major sources of the study of linguistic variety in Dutch and Frisian. Very positive evaluations have already been made by researchers in the field of linguistic geography. In the present contribution, it will be shown that also from a sociolinguistic point of view the RND can be considered a distinctly progressive project. This is clear from the method of fieldwork chosen (personal interviewing; narrow phonetic transcription; original data on display maps), from the choice of location (particular attention for the urban character) and from the selection criteria for informers (several informers per location, great attention for middle-class speakers and relatively young speakers). The sociolinguistic character is strengthened by the additional information in the section Taaitoestand' (socio-linguistic situation), in which a brief sociolinguistic description of the location studied is given. The information to the following aspects: the period during which fieldwork took place, the fieldworkers, Flanders versus the Netherlands, local variation and, finally, social variation.

Liberating a Prison Inmate from Illiteracy

Lennie was serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania Lennie prison. Joining four other inmates in an English class at the prison, he apologized at the first meeting for his presence among us. Until now, he explained, he had always been in special education classes. He justified his reporting to this class by saying, always wanted to learn to read. We assured him that he belonged with us because we were all here to explore the mysteries of words in our lives. Our guide would be the program Crashing the Language Barrier: The English Language--The Way It Is, which I had written. All that would be required of him, I explained, would be to ask questions, look for satisfying answers, and share his findings with the rest of us. From the beginning, Lennie (not his real name) had no difficulty finding questions. Finding satisfactory answers was a bit harder. In terms of reading skills, all he had brought with him that first evening, in addition to his need to know, was a recognition of the names of the letters of the alphabet. Even this information proved to be a handicap. Except for the five long vowels, a, e, i, o, u, their names were useless as tools to build a vocabulary of recognizable words. But when Lennie realized he had only thirty-seven speech sounds to distinguish, five of which he already knew, he relaxed. The fact that there were only twenty-six letters available to represent these thirty-seven sounds did not daunt him. In fact, Lennie, labeled as having an I.Q. under eighty, accepted the challenge of a language that at times seemed determined to be confusing. He began his journey to literacy by placing his trust in a simple code I had devised. In it, one symbol represented a single speech sound in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect we shared. Confident that every capital A would stand for the one sound of long /A/, as in ate, and the capital T, like all consonants in capitals, would always have the same sound, he enjoyed recognizing familiar words when represented in this code. His classmates waited patiently for him to figure out the coded words placed on the blackboard for them to spell. The easy words that I wrote for his benefit, such as RAN for rain, were as interesting to the other students as more sophisticated words, such as MANTAN for maintain (used to illustrate one spelling of the long /A/ sound). I used his easy words to introduce the code to new students.

Sociaal Milieu, Leeftijd en Sekse en de Taalvaardigheid in Het Nederlands Van Allochtone en Autochtone Basisschoolleerlingen

The results of a secondary analysis of the relationships between Dutch language proficiency and educational attainment of Dutch primary school children with different ethnic backgrounds are presented. Three groups of pupils are studied: 32 monolingual speakers of the Dutch standard language, 75 bilingual children speaking a Dutch dialect and standard Dutch and 39 bilingual non-indigenous children belonging to different ethnic groups. All children started their school career in the Netherlands. Main results are 1) the structure of Dutch language proficiency is equal for the three groups; 2) the effects of parental class on language proficiency differ between the three groups; 3) the effects of Dutch language proficiency on educational attainment are equal for the three groups and 4) 75% of the differences in Dutch language proficiency and school success can be explained by differences in social class.