Taal en Tongval - Volume 72, Issue 1, 2020

Abstract 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 Read More

Abstract 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. I Read More

Abstract 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 Read More

Abstract 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 Read More