Taal en Tongval - Volume 62, Issue 2, 2010

On February, 16, 2006, the website PLAntennamen in de Nederlandse Dialecten was launched („plant names in the Dutch dialects‟, or PLAND), which contains over 300.000 tokens, and which is potentially the biggest database of its kind worldwide. This paper provides a description of the history of PLAND, its contents and the interface.

1st and 3rd p. plural verb forms have largely converged into one form with nasal ending; only in a very small part in the southeast there is an opposition between the simple nasal ending and /nt/; the former occurs with most verbs, the second being restricted to the small class of vowel stems. The latter category (gaa-n, zie-n, doe-n, etc.) also displays very occasionally double endings (ga-nen, doe-ene, zie-nen). This text focuses on the following topics: •morphological stem variations, all of which also occur with other verbal forms (§ 2); we mention the interaction of plural / singular stems in preterits and the reduction of consonant to vowel stems; •the phonetic realisations of the nasal ending, as [ə], [ən] or [n], with consonant stems, both present and preterit, and [n] or zero with vowel stems, both primary and secondary (§ 3 – 4 - 5.1-5.3); with consonant stems the character of the final consonant appears to be a major conditioning factor; •phonological changes in vowel stems with underlying tense vowels: these include both shortening (du.n > dun) and palatalisation (du.n > dy.n, which is generally combined with shortening: du.n > dun/dy.n > dyn) (§5.4); palatalisation occurs in most eastern (Brabant and Limburg dialects that have shortening, but does not in the western (Flemish) dialects; between these geographical entities a number of dialects display forms with velar/palatal diphthongs (e.g. duin). The text ends with the discussion of two specific issues: the development of a new „pronominal‟ ending in 1st p. pl. (deriving from the homophonic enclitic subject pronoun) on the one hand, the generalisation of the nasal ending to the 2nd p. plural in a small number of dialects, both in the northwest and in the southeast, on the other.

The language situation in Flanders is and always has been unique. Varying from many different base dialects to a standard language, the Flemish language continuum makes an interesting topic of linguistic study. However research from the perspective of language accommodation theories is not widely spread. Nonetheless, this type of research proves to open new possibilities to learn more about the use of language in Flanders. Based on a corpus of conversation recordings, we examined the informal speech of adolescents from two different provinces in Flanders, namely Limburg and West Flanders. We investigated if and how the speech of the informants changed when in conversation with their peer group and when brought into contact with informants from another region in Flanders. To do this, we analyzed the data on three variables, being the diminutives, the personal pronouns and the indefinite article. The results show a difference in the degree of accommodation between the two groups of informants. We noticed much more accommodation in the speech of the adolescents from Oostende whose informal speech in the peer group is still very close to the traditional dialect. The informants from Limburg, who use a leveled out form of dialect, stick closer to their way of speaking when brought into contact with the informants from the other province. The accommodations (or lack of accomodations) prove of a Brabant background. This may also enforce some of the existing theories about the so called „tussentaal‟.

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in the application of modern methodology to the study of geographic language variation. One instance of this, applied to the Dutch language area, is the topic of dialectometry. It seems fair to say that the measurements in most dialectometrical projects are fairly superficial from a grammatical point of view. In this article, we propose a view of dialect distance which is radically different both in its methodology and in its goals. We present a view in which the distances between grammars are computed rather than the differences between words or constructions, which we view as products of the grammars. In particular, we consider the phenomenon of umlaut in diminutive forms. Umlaut, a phenomenon in which back vowels become front in certain morphological contexts, is virtually absent in the western parts of the Dutch speaking area, but fully productive in many parts of the east. We show how this east-west transition can be elegantly described as a gradual change in grammars

This review article discusses the merits and demerits of Rob Belemans' dissertation “Taal of Tongval. De gespleten Limburgse kus, oraal erfgoed en taalpolitiek” [language or dialect: the split Limburgian kiss, oral heritage and language politics]. In addition to a discussion of Belemans' description of the different approaches of Belgium versus the Netherlands with regard to the recognition of Limburgian as a regional language in the Charter, this review article provides some basic background information about language politics in The Netherlands. More specifically, it is argued that a fruitful strategy of language politics should be based on the use of the harmony model (instead of the conflict model), as is evidenced by the relative success of the language policy of the province of Fryslân.

The Syntactic Atlas of Dutch Dialects (SAND, volume 2; Barbiers, van der Auwera, Bennis, Boef, De Vogelaer en Van der Ham 2008) claims that Frisian has the Infinitivus-pro-Participio effect in clusters of three verbs, and, surprisingly, even in clusters of two verbs. It is argued here that both claims are wrong and that the claims are caused by an incorrect analysis of verbal endings in Frisian. More specifically, the occasional homophony in Frisian of the gerund with the past participle has been misinterpreted and both have been incorrectly analysed as verbal infinitives, because of their orthographical resemblance to Dutch infinitives.

From the end of 1915 until just after the armistice, Wilhelm Doegen made gramophone recordings of the nearly 250 languages or dialects of the soldiers interned in the German prisoner of war camps. After the war, the 1650 shellac discs resulting from this impressive undertaking made up the foundation of his Sound Department at the Prussian State Library. After Doegen’s dismissal in 1933, the department was attached to the University of Berlin. Eventually, it wholly lost its autonomy and its sound files were neglected. Recently, however, they have been rediscovered, inventoried, digitized and integrated in a multimedia database at the Humboldt University. Doegen’s recordings of the respective dialects of six Dutch-speaking places in Belgium date back to the First World War. In 1927, he recorded an extensive series of samples of Frisian dialects in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, Dutch dialectology has hitherto paid scarcely any attention to his extraordinary project.

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