Taal en Tongval - Volume 72, Issue 1, 2020

Dialect Death in the Low Countries

The death of Dutch dialects has been anticipated on various occasions in the past, a prediction that had not been borne out until the end of the twentieth century. Reliable figures about the state of autochthonous language diversity are surprisingly scarce. Lumping together and harmonizing figures from long term studies on dialect competences of students and schoolchildren from Belgium and the Netherlands, one can observe a gradual decline in the Netherlands over the 20^th century and a more rapid decline in Flanders since the sixties, both ultimately heading towards (nearly) ‘zero’ for children born in 2020. Drastic reduction of linguistic diversity turns out not to be a privilege of the Amazonas or Papua New Guinea. The linguistic map of the Dutch speaking areas is filled with Randstad-oriented speech in the Netherlands, an emerging Tussentaal (‘In-between-language’) in Flanders and pockets of resistance of traditional vernaculars in Fryslân and Dutch Limburg, as well as some incidental communities in a few villages around the country.

Digital tools for dialectology at the Ghent University

Till the year 2000, all professors of Dutch Linguistics at Ghent University were professional dialectologists, who were at pains to carefully document the dialects of Dutch speaking Belgium. These efforts resulted in large collections of dialect data. During the last decade, all collections were digitized and made available in open access to a large audience. In this article, we will in short present both already available databases (and the accompanying tools) and the projects in progress. Eventually, all Ghent dialect databases will be hosted and cared for by the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (Institute for the Dutch Language) at Leiden (The Netherlands).

The days when dialectology was a quiet island in the (sometimes rough) ocean of modern linguistics seem to be over. Since the so-called social turn and the integration of quantitative methods into the study of urban as well as rural dialects, the barriers between early ‘Labovian’ sociolinguistics and dialectology have gradually been broken down. Of late, the study of dialect variation has become more and more an integral part of mainstream formal theory as ‘micro-variation’. Even more recently, constructivist approaches (such as Usage-based Phonology and Exemplar Theory for phonetics as well as ethnographic perspectives) are entering and enriching the field.

Apart from these various developments, at least in the Old World, the object appears to be changing more and more rapidly, giving rise to the erosion of traditional dialect landscapes and the emergence of supra-local koinai as well as dialect/standard continua.

This paper addresses some of the main aspects of these tendencies. We will discuss questions such as: how can the new types of language variety be studied; can dialectology be enriched with other than the traditional data and methods; how far-reaching is the innovative impact of the various disciplinary, inter-subdisciplinary and inter-disciplinary cross-fertilisations?

The present paper discusses gender marking, i.e. the morphological marking of masculine, feminine and neuter lexical gender in the adnominal domain, in Brabantish dialects spoken in the southern Dutch province North-Brabant. Gender markers belong to the most salient features of North-Brabantish, but with a process of dialect levelling well on its way for at least fifty years, knowledge of lexical gender is fading away. This study delves into these variation patterns. The results of a quantitative analysis of written questionnaires (mainly filled out by elderly dialect speakers, N=700) triggered us to conduct a small in-depth study of speech data from adolescents in the Eindhoven region (N=15). Based on these data, we argue that there is a high level of heterogeneity when it comes to adnominal gender marking.

In this paper, we aim at describing and categorizing the various types of variation. The data includes omissions of the traditional Brabantish masculine gender marking, indicating that speakers are converging towards Standard Dutch. However, the data also reveals that in 30% of all utterances speakers apply gender marking in multiple ways. We find three types of variation: 
1) masculine gender marking is only partly applied in comparison to the traditional rules of dialect grammar (compromise-constructions), 2) masculine gender markers appear in noun groups where they should not appear according to the dialect grammar (e.g. feminine, neuter, plural), so-called hyperdialectisms, and 3) speakers use innovative gender marking constructions: accumulate forms with two masculine suffixes, so-called hypermarkings. Based on previous research, we argue that typical dialect features, such as gender markers, are part of a regional speech style and play an important role in identity formation. As shibboleths of such a speech style, gender markers are over-generalized by speakers who want to profile themselves as ‘genuinely’ Brabantish. Also, individual patterns of gender marking indicate that salience in non-canonical sentence structures (e.g. focus) might be an important factor when it comes to emphasizing a deviation from the standard language, in line with (regional) identity construction through the use of shibboleths. Future research is necessary to validate these initial findings.