Surviving Limburg and Hollandic dialect features and what they have in common

Abstract

Abstract Two studies of processes of dialect levelling are presented. The first one concerns a divergent local Limburg dialect of Dutch. The second study concerns 15 local Hollandic dialects, spoken in the northwestern corner of the country. Whereas the Limburg study is based on data from the author’s fieldwork recordings, the Hollandic investigation is based on questionnaire data from two huge (equally fieldwork-based) projects. The Limburg study focusses on 20 dialect features (in the phonological, morphological and syntactic modules) and allows for apparent time comparisons, while the Hollandic research permits real time comparisons of the variation in 7 features in the phonological and morphosyntactic components. For both studies the data were elicited from individual speakers. The dialects in both areas appear to arrive at their own unique selection of non-standard features. Despite the many differences and despite the fact that the dialect situations differ in several respects, the findings of both studies converge in the sense that the resistant phenomena share properties pertaining to their relative geographical distribution, their socio-emblematic nature and, internally, to the architecture of language components, the conditioning/regularity of the phenomena as well as their mutual coherence, both structurally and statistically.

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