Research topic
Listening to radio or television one notices the tendency for standard Dutch
(ABN) to become more and more differentiated, i.e. regionally colored. The
standard speech of many speakers betrays the areas they come from. While the
standard language becomes more differentiated, the opposite tendency is going on
for dialects. Being influenced by standard Dutch and by each other they become
less differentiated and fuse to larger wholes: regiolects. This change is
extensively described by Hoppenbrouwers (1990).
A regiolect is a continuum of intermediate language forms which includes the
whole structural space between dialect and standard language (Hoppenbrouwers
(1990), p. 84, see also Hinskens (1993), Auer & Hinskens (1996) and Hinskens,
Auer & Kerswill (2005)). Regiolects are the result of increased mobility and
migration on the one hand, and the influence of the standard language in
education and communication on the other hand. Important sociolinguistic factors
are the speakers' age, sex, education and degree of urbanization (pp. 86 and
172), where old rural poorly educated males and young urban high educated females
are the extremes [conservative, traditional dialect] and [innovative,
regiolect], respectively.
The goal of this reseach is to examine how the change from Dutch dialects to
regiolects is reflected in the production and perception of the dialect
speakers. We would like to test three hypotheses:
(1) Perceptive distance measurements which are based on the recordings of
innovative speakers will suggest larger and less sharply distinguished areas
than those which are based on the recordings of conservative speakers. We expect
that especially relatively small dialect areas which comprise only a few places,
will be fused with larger areas.
(2) This change affects variation at the lexical level ('kopstubber' becomes
'roagebol') more strongly than variation at the lexical phonological level
('hoes' becomes 'huus'). The lexical phonogical level is affected more strongly
than the postlexical level (e.g. sandhi phenomena), which in turn is affected
more strongly than the purely phonetic level (for example dialect-specific
pronunciations of speech segments). For all levels we expect that the most
significant changes will be found in areas where dialects are relatively distant
from the standard language.
(3) The change from dialect to regiolect, found in speech production, influences
the speaker’s perception. Conservative speakers perceive dialect groups (small
and many groups), innovative speakers perceive regiolect groups (larger and
fewer groups). Since perception mainly follows production, speaker’s production
will change more than their perception.
In the Motie van
tolerantie en attentie, edited by Siemon Reker in 2001, we read that saving
dialect material in archives and the study of dialect change and dialect loss
should contribute to a accurate evaluation of the embedding, relevance and
emotional value of dialects in our society. Our research is intended to be such
a contribution.