Note

  • THIS IS LARGELY COPIED FROM MY PROPOSAL TO THE DBC

Introduction

  • It is commonly stated that Netherlandic standard and substandard speech differ only marginally (for instance by Van Sterkenburg, 2009, p. 72 and Geeraerts et al., 2013). This claim is usually bundled together with an implication that Dutch speech is moving towards mass leveling, through processes of dialect loss and concomitant demoticization of Standard Dutch (Grondelaers & Van Hout, 2011). The claim is then that the standard has “stratified to become an indicator of the speaker’s regional origin (…) and of the speaker’s social profile …”.

  • While the aforementioned claims pertain to language production, the data used as support are largely perceptual and attitudinal. In the hereinabove mentioned Grondelaers & Van Hout (2011), for instance, the authors invoke attitudinal research when talking about the formation of different accents within and demoticization of the standard language. Other studies on dialectal prevalence, usage of regional features and leveling, such as van de Velde et al. (2010), Wilting et al. (2014) and Schmeets & Cornips (2022) are survey-based, which leaves the interpretation of whether what they speak constitutes a “dialect” or “standard Dutch” up to the participants themselves.

This leaves us with little direct data that can afford an impression of the modern stratification of Dutch from the perspective of production. More concretely, the following questions remain unanswered:

  • What really is the status of the dialects? What is the degree to which dialect loss has occurred?

  • What is the aftermath of dialect loss? Do we see the emergence of (substandard?) regiolects? If yes, what are the linguistic characteristics of those regiolects?

  • What is the vertical relationship between the dialects, regiolects and standard language? Do we observe (a movement towards) a diglossic, diaglossic or even monostratal state of affairs?

  • More broadly, the focus of this research can be described as follows: what is the vertical structure of the spoken language of the Netherlands and how is it changing?

  • Answering this question begets data that include both intra-speaker and inter-regional variation. This study therefore sets as one of its main goals to construct a corpus documenting variation within individual Netherlandic speakers and spanning multiple regions. The nature of this corpus is further elaborated in [[Methodology]] .

2. Hypotheses

  • In her doctoral dissertation, Ghyselen (2016) observes a narrowing of linguistic repertoires in Flanders. Namely, younger speakers in Antwerp or Ghent have a weakened handle on the local dialect. Furthermore, even those that seemed to be able to produce it, did not do so even when their conversation partner was an acquaintance of the same region. Given the Netherlandic origin of Standard Dutch, paired with survey reports of low dialect use mentioned in the previous section, this research works with the hypothesis that Netherlandic speakers will show a narrowing of their linguistic repertoires similar to that found in Flanders (and likely even more advanced). Additionally, this narrowing is expected to be stronger in younger speakers than in older speakers.

  • The idea of a stratal compression of Netherlandic Dutch brings up the logical next question: if we do indeed see leveling, what is Dutch leveling to? Discussion on supraregional features of Netherlandic Dutch has paid significant attention to phonetic phenomena, such as the diphthongization of long mid-vowels and lowering of diphthongs (often referred to as “Polder Dutch”), the devoicing of voiced fricatives and the pronunciation of final -r as an approximant, sometimes also referred to as the Gooise R. Jan Stroop, the researcher who coined the aforementioned “Polder Dutch”, seems to suggest that it is an independent linguistic evolution, but seeing as the devoicing and approximant R phenomena all appear (and indeed seem to originate) in the Hollandic variants (van Oostendorp, 2013), this seems to strongly suggest a case of modern Hollandic expansion rather than independent evolution. This has already been observed by van de Velde (1996), who notes that within the period of 1935 to 1993, the devoicing of fricatives and diphthongization of mid-vowels has dramatically increased, all of which are Hollandic features. This research will further explore this hypothesis by extending it to more variables and by reassessing it using much more modern data.