March 7, 2016

Regional accent research confirms language discrimination

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 2:57 pm

Dutch-Moroccans

I’ve been working with French Europeans lately and not 15 minutes goes by before someone points out my ‘charming’ French Canadian accent. The same group of people also work with North Africans and Dutch people who speak French but don’t point out their accents for fear of sounding either like racists toward non-Caucasians or insulting the white Dutch managers. It’s OK for a card-carrying French person to tell me as a white person from an ex colony that I have an accent, but they wouldn’t dare tell a black person from Senegal the same thing.

I explained this later down the pub to a French-speaking Dutch person who claims she doesn’t judge people by their accent right after telling me I had one. I asked her if she tells Dutch people who obviously have an ethnic background that they have an accent in Dutch and she says she wouldn’t do that, but didn’t tell me why. Someone then tried to explain that it’s because a ‘decent’ Dutch accent makes you accepted by the white Dutch majority, and recent research shows that a heavy ‘ethnic’ accent puts you at the bottom rung of the ladder where you’ll find the Dutch-Moroccans and their accent.

The Moroccan accent is said to have no prestige whatsoever and is seen as negative on all fronts by the predominantly white students interviewed in a recent survey, even though other ethnic groups and the native Dutch use words and pronunciations from this ethnolect. Researcher Stefan Grondelaers, who has a Flemish accent, says that Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb and comedian Najib Amhali, both Dutch-Moroccans, have had to “limit their Moroccan accent to a minimum to get ahead”.

Researcher at the Radboud University in Nijmegen and linked to scientific research into Dutch regional accents, Grondelaers explains that we use stereotypes to avoid collecting information about others that we don’t intend to use, and this is part of our evolutionary process. He goes on to explain that when people judge each other’s accents based solely on what they hear, they make snap judgements.

A Dutch television program (kicks in at 25:10, in Dutch) that discusses the discrimination Dutch people with regional accents face would have been handy in the pub yesterday. A part of the video has two women in booths that cannot see each other. A younger woman with an accent from Drenthe reads the news to an older woman from the Randstad area, the ‘prestige accent of the country’. The older woman, knowingly enjoying her ‘standard’ accent, says the younger woman sounds like a farmer with a bad perm, big glasses, bad clothing, and whole bunch of other stereotypes that she couldn’t possibly know. Grondelaers explains that the woman with the Randstad accent can look down on others because all other accents are less prestigious than hers.

Another part of the video shows a Dutch-Morrocan man trying to get a test drive for a car who is treated very differently on the phone than a white Dutch speaker. It’s so bad that the person on the other end does nothing to keep the conversation going. The Dutchman gets everything he wants and actual conversation. Grondelaers basically states that people are simply “racist beasts that walk upright.”

(Link: www.kennislink.nl, Photo of Djellabas by Roel Wijnants, some rights reserved)

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February 18, 2016

Learn good Dutch grammar with rock music

Filed under: General,Literature,Music by Orangemaster @ 5:12 pm

Dutch spelling is often a headache for many people from foreigners to children because it officially changes a lot. A series aimed at children called ‘Snap je?’ (‘Get it?’) deals with the dreaded conjugation of verbs where after the root of the verb there’s a ‘d’ or ‘t’ added to it, something that is tough to get right.

Dutch verbs with a stem ending in ‘d’ add a ‘t’ for the second and third person singular, but it does not change the pronunciation because ‘d’ at the end of a word is pronounced like a ‘t’, while ‘dt’ is pronounced as ‘t’, according to a quick explanation from Hear Dutch Here. In other words we often can’t hear the difference between the ‘d’ and ‘t’ at the end of any word because ‘d’ is voiced and ‘t’ is voiceless and it gets worse when you have ‘dt’ together. Getting any of this wrong is commonly referred to as a ‘d-t mistake’ in Dutch. It also makes a difference in tense in some words, so it is a big deal to get it right.

For anyone who knows French, when we get stuck with how to write the ending of a verb in the right tense we use the verb ‘vendre’ (‘to sell’) as a default and then conjugate our chosen verb accordingly. The Dutch in this video suggest the exact same with the verb ‘lopen’ (‘to walk’). And then there’s the fact that the band from Nijmegen De Staat wrote the music behind these fun grammar lessons, so give it a whirl.

(Link: www.ed.nl)

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December 2, 2015

Dutch-Moroccan ethnolect has its own flavour

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 11:58 am

Dutch-Moroccans

Does the Dutch-Moroccan ethnic group speak ‘street language’ (urban slang) or just a modified version of standard Dutch? According to postdoctoral researcher Khalid Mourigh of Leiden University, it’s an ethnolect, or what he likes to call ‘Moroccan Flavoured Dutch’ (MFD), a term coined by two linguists Jacomine Nortier and Margreet Dorleijn back in 2006. Interestingly, other ethnic groups and the native Dutch use words and pronunciations from this ethnolect.

Wikipedia tells us that Dutch-Moroccans make up some 2% of the country’s population, and the city with the most Dutch-Moroccans is Gouda, with Amsterdam in second place.

Mourigh explains that Dutch-Moroccans often speak Berber and Arabic at home with their parents, but since Berber isn’t taught formally and Arabic is more for the mosque, Dutch is what young people speak with each other, albeit with an accent, sometimes a heavy one. Urban slang is more something for the ‘native’ Dutch and Surinamese youth. However, Dutch-Moroccans of the second and third generation choose to have an accent when they speak to distinguish themselves, according to Nortier and Dorleijn. On the other hand, if they want to put their best foot forward in a job interview, standard Dutch is usually preferred.

(Link: www.kennislink.nl, Photo of Djellabas by Roel Wijnants, some rights reserved)

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November 11, 2015

Boffins launch app for Dutch regional accents

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 11:36 am
fries1

On 2 December the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) together with science-oriented Dutch public-service broadcaster NTR will be launching the ‘Sprekend Nederland’ app that analyses groups of speakers and what they think of each other. Are some variants taking over or in fact disappearing? A lot of data has to be collected to be able to draw conclusions and Dutch speakers can contribute, including ‘ethnic varieties’ because even ethnic groups speak different types of Dutch depending on where they live.

The app needs to be installed on a smartphone so you can record a few sentences and contribute. Researchers point out that it would be nice if the kids made sure their grandparents joined in as well, a group that’s a bit less tech-savvy than most. And what about getting Dutch-speaking foreigners like myself? I wonder if I can join or if it’s for card-carrying Dutch people only. I’ve asked.

UPDATE: Anybody who speaks Dutch can contribute, ‘even with a different background’.

‘Patat’ or ‘friet’? They both mean ‘fries’, but people use one or the other depending on where they live. The research here is not about dialects, but about ‘regionally different versions of Dutch’. The scientists and app builders from Amsterdam, Utrecht and Nijmegen had never sought to analyse the diversity of Dutch on such a large scale before. They wanted to build an app that was scientific, but also appealed to the mainstream. The boffins also want to create a Flemish version, but that’s not in the cards yet.

(Links: www.nwo.nl, www.kennislink.nl)

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July 28, 2015

Americans try and sing Dutch summer hit

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 5:35 pm

To all the unilingual English speakers who keep saying they can’t learn Dutch after years of being here, maybe you should take a page from these American kids: fake it until it sounds vaguely Dutch. Top tip: don’t be afraid of sounding or looking stupid, either. Half way through the video the guys get asked questions about the song, a bit like a Dutch exam, but with more adult content.

‘Drank & Drugs’ (‘Booze and Drugs’) by Lil Kleine & Ronnie Flex is going viral, and we’re joining in. The first guy can at least says something remotely Dutch on the beat, while the second guy can’t seem to get it right. OK, the ‘spaghetti’ bit is funny.

It’s not ‘impossible to translate’ as the link suggests, considering many words are Dutchified English words anyway, but booze, drugs and bitches (“if they are bitches,” says the first guy) is common fare, pardon the pun.

And for the fans, here’s the original version:

(Link: www.deondernemer.nl)

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September 27, 2014

Crisis of the Wims, a boy’s name in decline

Filed under: History by Branko Collin @ 8:30 pm

wThe name Wim is as Dutch as it gets, but how long will it remain in use? A 2009 booklet called Lang Leve Wim (Long Live Wim) by linguist Wim (!) Daniëls sounds the alarm.

I haven’t read the book myself, but one review quotes what appears to be the introduction: “In the past few years only a couple of Wims have been born. The peak for the name Wim was between 1950 and 1960 in the Netherlands and between 1970 and 1980 in Flanders.”

The Meertens Institute says there are still a good number of Wims walking around the country. Based on census data the institute estimates there are still about 3,500 men called Wim in the Netherlands, or 0.05% of the population. Sociale Verzekeringsbank (SVB), the agency responsible for child support, says 13 baby boys were named Wim in 2013. That is definitely more than the ‘couple’ Daniëls speaks of, but not a chink in the armour of the top five of boys’ names in the Netherlands for 2013, Sem, Levi, Bram, Daan and Finn, which were given to sons more than 700 times each.

The situation is not as bad however as Wim Daniëls says. He has to use a trick to uphold his disaster story of dewimmification. As Bill is the short version of William in English, so is Wim the short version of Willem in Dutch. In 2013, again according to SVB, 264 boys were called Willem, and with a king bearing the same name I estimate the likeliness of that number to drop by much is low. Which, in the end, I think is a good thing. As Daniëls says, what would a world be without Wimmen?

(Link: Holly Moors)

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February 23, 2013

Dutch with an accent just as easy to understand

Filed under: Science by Branko Collin @ 3:13 pm

People who speak Dutch with a foreign accent are just as easy to understand as native speakers. Listeners may need a while to adapt to the accent, anywhere from a few sentences to a few minutes.

Yesterday Marijt Witteman received her PhD for researching how fast listeners adapt to foreign accents. One perhaps surprising finding was that native speakers who were used to the accent, for instance, Dutch people living near the German border listening to Dutch spoken by Germans, understood words pronounced by language learners just as fast as they understood words pronounced by native speakers.

Even listeners who were not regularly exposed to the foreign accent only needed a few minutes of ‘priming’ to get up to speed. Witteman used reaction time tests in which subjects first heard a word, then saw the word written out on a screen, after which the subjects had to state if a word existed or not. Previous experiments had shown that people respond faster if they hear the word before they see it on the screen. The response times for words pronounced with an accent were just as fast as for words pronounced without an accent.

Witteman’s results could be useful in designing language courses. Course materials could be less about perfecting pronunciation and more about understanding a language. My personal take-away lesson is that Hollanders can stop pretending they don’t understand what the rest of the Dutch are saying. The game is up!

(Photo by Leo Viëtor, some rights reserved)

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January 6, 2013

Another Dutch word of 2012 – plofkip

Filed under: Animals by Branko Collin @ 9:23 pm

A late addition to our list of Words of the Year 2012 is that of Onze Taal, ‘the Dutch association for language lovers’.

That word is ‘plofkip‘ (literally ‘exploding chicken’), a propaganda word meaning ‘broiler’.

Second and third place went to ‘appen’ (to Whatsapp) and ‘pandapunt’ (points you get for sexual abstinence). Plofkip got 44% of the votes.

(Link: Eamelje. Photo by Flickr user normanack, some rights reserved)

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Kid shows off mad word game skills (video)

Filed under: Gaming by Branko Collin @ 12:19 pm

Ruzzle is a simple word game in which you have to tap a series of connected letters on a randomized grid to form as many words as you can in two minutes.

Here is a video by a guy called Flupkees who can guess 136 Dutch words in a single session (of the 302 possible words). He is going so fast I cannot even follow what is going on: pot, poter, poten, po, pon, ???, pik, pikt, pikte, prik, prikt, prikte and so on.

(Video: YouTube/Flupkees. Link: Marc van Oostendorp)

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November 18, 2012

Rumble in Limburg over fake accents on children’s TV show

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:39 pm

Yesterday the city of Roermond in Limburg played host to the official reception of Saint Nicholas in the Netherlands, and the city was the centre of attention in the week before in children’s news show Sinterklaasjournaal.

One of the features of the show are street interviews with a band of jolly Limburgers that turned out not to be Limburgers at all, but actors from Holland that could not be bothered to learn the local accent well.

Sinterklaasjournaal broadcaster NTR told De Gelderlander that they asked all of two (!) actors from Limburg to appear on the show, “but they both couldn’t come. The list runs out at some point.”

Limburg has a rich stage tradition, producing many great actors and directors. Perhaps these actors were too expensive for a two-bit (but still tax-funded) operation like NTR?

Children from Roermond told another public broadcaster, NOS, that “they are mocking us, and that is just wrong.” Another child had a practical solution to help heal all wounds: “I think Saint Nicholas should give more gifts to the children of Limburg this year.”

(Photo: screenshot of Sinterklaasjournaal. Link: Marc van Oostendorp)

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