F.L.M.P. Hinskens

Variation in the realization of /εi/ by Dutch youngsters: from local urban dialects to emerging ethnolects?

Abstract How do speakers of current Turkish and Moroccan ethnolects of Dutch deal with phonemes that do not exist in their heritage languages and that are at the same time subject to pronounced regional and social variation in the Dutch speech community at large, such as the Dutch diphthong /εi/? This diphthong does not occur in Turkish and Berber and it occurs only as a dialectal allophone in certain dialects of Moroccan Arabic. Data from speakers from the Amsterdam and Nijmegen urban areas are studied. In the Amsterdam dialect, the diphthong is traditionally subject to monophthongization and lowering, yielding realizations as [a:] or [a:], while in Nijmegen the diphthong is only subject to monophthongization, resulting in the variant [ε:]. Recently, a new lowered, diphthongal variant [ai] entered colloquial spoken standard Dutch. Therefore, ethnolect speakers have a wide range of variants to ‘choose’ from: the traditional standard Dutch variant [εi], the new variant [ai], which is expanding areally and socially, and the monophthongal variants of the surrounding urban dialects. Two variable properties of /εi/ are examined: (1) height of the prominent first element, and (2) the degree of monophthongization. The urban dialect features which had developed into sociolect features over the past generations appear to be undergoing social redistribution to become ethnolect markers.

The talk of the town: languages in Amsterdam 1507-2007

SummaryThis paper is an impressionistic sketch of the language history of Amsterdam in the past five hundred years. To this end we discuss some of the main economic and demographic developments of the city and the political units that it has formed a part of, notably the County of Holland, the Republic of the United Netherlands and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Departing from the past and present dialect situation and processes such as dialect levelling, we also study the language contact effects of migration movements of several types, immigration from abroad and from different regions in the Netherlands. Religious refugees played an important role; this holds for e.g. Brabant Protestants from the Antwerp area around 1585, German religious refugees during the Thirty years War (1618–1648), and Huguenots (i.e. French Protestants) from 1685 onwards. Particular attention is paid to Sephardic (from 1593) and Ashkenazic Jewry (from 1618); especially the Ashkenazim and their main vernacular, Yiddish had an important role as Yiddish was the source for Jewish Dutch. It had long-lasting lexical (on Amsterdam dialects and modern colloquial Dutch) and phonetic effects (on the Amsterdam dialects).More recently, economic considerations played the main role in the immigration, as in the case of the Chinese (as of 1911), Italians, Yugoslavs and the Spaniards (after World War II). Large scale migration from Surinam started in the 1960s. The main groups among the latest arrivals include Turkish migrants (now 5.1% of the Amsterdam population) and Moroccans (8.7%).We end this paper with a brief sketch of a research project which concentrates on the relatively young ethnolects of Dutch spoken by second generation migrants of Turkish and Moroccan descent in Amsterdam as well in the city of Nijmegen (in the southeastern part of the Netherlands).