Taal en Tongval - Volume 70, Issue 1, 2018

The diachrony of Dutch hoeven ‘need’

This paper presents a diachronic investigation into the semantic and grammatical evolution of the Dutch negative polarity modal auxiliary hoeven (‘need’). The study is corpus-based, working with representative samples of occurrences of the verb and of its predecessor, the (originally) full verb behoeven (‘need’), from different stages of Dutch, from Old Dutch until today. It shows how, after the initiation of a tendency to auxiliarize in behoeven in Early New Dutch (which largely ends again after that period), the short form hoeven splits off from the latter in that same time period and takes the lead as the auxiliary variant from then onwards. It also reveals, however, that in the course of New Dutch hoeven starts to develop new autonomous uses, in a way comparable to what has happened in the other central modal auxiliaries in Dutch (a case of collective degrammaticalization). Moreover, it shows how, from its emergence onwards, this modal auxiliary develops a wide range of modal and related meanings in a very short time, no doubt due to a strive for (semantic) analogy with the other (and much older) central modals.

The present contribution aims to present the Kleiner Niederländischer Sprachatlas unter Einschluss des Westfriesischen (KNSA, ‘Concise Linguistic Atlas of Dutch including West Frisian’). With the Belgian and Dutch Wenker sentences as its source of data, the KNSA represents a westward expansion of its model and predecessor atlas, the Kleiner Deutscher Sprachatlas (KDSA, ‘Concise Linguistic Atlas of German’), which charted historical data from Georg Wenker’s survey of the former German Empire at the end of the 19^th century. Less well known is the collection of Wenker sentences that was carried out in the Dutch language area beginning during the First World War, then in the 1920s, and in the 1930s. The KNSA systematically charts these historical Dutch and West Frisian data, and allows for their comparison to the German Wenker data. Although initiated in the 1990s, the project could only be completed in 2017. The KNSA was published on the internet research platform Regionalsprache.de (REDE). This contribution will first present the atlas’ data basis, then explain the relationship of the KNSA to the KDSA, and discuss the former’s publication. Finally, a brief case study analysis of h-dropping in Dutch dialects will conclude the contribution to demonstrate one possibility for further research with the atlas.

Near-identical twin toponyms along the state border. How do they reflect the linguistic and political past?

The Netherlands (hereafter: NL) shares its national border with Belgium (B) and Germany (D). Alongside the border are toponyms which are either identical (like Lemiers: NL, also D), or near-identical, like Clinge (NL)/ De Klinge (B) or Aamsveen (NL)/ Amtsvenn (D). The names concerned denote adjoining settlements and regions. Name pairs like Aamsveen/ Amtsvenn, differring in pronunciation, are comparable to name pairs like Görlitz/ Zgorzelec, on the German-Polish border.

The Belgian border is not a linguistic one; Dutch is the standard language on both sides of it. The German border, however, currently divides two standard languages, while there used to be a continuum on the dialectal level until until about 1940. Since the 19^th C, both the Dutch and the German standard language have won ground at the expense of the dialect, due to the increased influence of the national administrations.

This paper focuses on present twin names along the Dutch state border which show small differences. For example, some differences are (partly) orthographic (Clinge (NL)/De Klinge (B)), others imply (partial) translations and folk etymological adaptations (Aamsveen (NL)/ Amtsvenn (D)), or relate to lexical differences: Baarle Hertog (B) versus Baarle Nassau (NL).

The paper proposes a typology and tries to explain the differences by relating them (with respect to the German border) to increased influence of the German standard language and orthography (and, by consequence, spelling pronunciation), and, with regard to the Belgian border, to different spelling regulations.

Dialect and standard language in contact. The many forms of the Langstraat dialect

Over the past century, the dialects of the Langstraat region in the province of Noord-Brabant have structurally changed under the influence of the Dutch standard language. The younger dialect varieties that have emerged, have lost characteristic features through time and have adopted features of Standard Dutch. Despite convergence and dialect levelling, however, more variation arises with new forms that sometimes exhibit even more divergent features than their traditional counterparts. Moreover, all participants in the present study seem to use a diversity of linguistic forms and intermediate forms are all but fixated, and even one and the same speaker shows diversity in the use of his dialect.