'Child' in the dialects of North Brabant, Netherlands
Today I’m here with a different kind of post: not an infographic about etymology this time, but a dialect map of the word for ‘child’ in Brabantine, the native language of my grand-parents, which I’d like to tell you more about below (reading time: 5 minutes).
What you’re seeing is a map of the Dutch province of North Brabant, where I was born. It shows cognates of Standard Dutch kind (related to German Kind but not to English child). The data were collected in major study conducted by professor Antoon Weijnen in 1937. Minor pronunciation differences aside, he found nine different forms across an area that only spans 126 kilometers from west to east.
This map doesn’t include the plural forms. In the west, you’ll find the plural endings -ere and -ers (e.g. kind ~ kindere and kiend ~ kienders), while in the center and east, the plural ending is -er (e.g. kijnd ~ kijnder). Compare Dutch kind ~ kinderen and German Kind ~ Kinder. In certain central and eastern dialects, the plural stem also slightly differs from the singular, e.g. kijnd ~ kender or kèènd ~ kender, with the stem exhibiting vowel shortening.
A small country, huge differences
According to an estimation by linguist Joop van der Horst (1999), at the end of the 19th century only 5% of the Dutch population spoke Standard Dutch. This standard language – originally a literary language based on the urban Hollandic dialects in the west – was only widely adopted as the spoken language during the interwar period (1918-1939).
What language did the other 95% percent speak? Every city, town, village and hamlet had its own descendant of Old Dutch (in the west and south), Old Saxon (in the northeast), or Old Frisian (in the north). You couldn’t find two places where the spoken languages were identical.
In whatever direction you traveled, every few kilometers you’d hear differences, not only in vocabulary but also in phonology, morphology and syntax. For example, while the westernmost dialects had up to 19 vowel phonemes, the easternmost had 30 or more – diphthongs excluded.
For instance, here’s the sentence ‘That girl very often walks around the house barefoot’ (construed for the sake of showing differences) in two dialects spoken 90 kilometers apart:
- Helmond: Dè durske lupt heil duk op bloute vuujt dur 't hois.
- Hoogerheide: Da maske lwop jeel dikkels op blwoote vóéte dur 't èùs.
Three words are the same: op (on), dur (through) and 't (the).
The West Germanic dialect continuum
The dialects gradually changed from one to another, without clear-cut borders. Every word and every feature has its own map, with areas demarcated by different boundaries, called isoglosses. For instance, the map of the word for ‘house’ has entirely different isoglosses than this map of ‘child’.
This situation is called a dialect continuum. The West Germanic continuum extended into Belgium in the south and Germany in the east, stretching across Germany, Switzerland and Austria, bordered by Danish in the north, Slavic in the east and south, and Romance in the west and south.
The demise of the dialects
The situation has changed a lot since 1937. In the urban west of the Netherlands – around the cities of Rotterdam, The Hague and Amsterdam, where the standard language was developed between the 16th and the 20th century – most of the traditional dialects have been replaced by mere local accents of Dutch. The farther from this region you travel, the more living dialects you’ll find.
While the dialectal differences still exist in the province of North Brabant, with every generation they’ve become fewer. That’s because the Brabantine dialects have been massively influenced by Standard Dutch. They’ve been losing their characteristic vocabulary, phoneme distinctions that Dutch lacks have been fading away, and grammatical features – such as a two-way case system of proper names – have disappeared.
The sociolinguistic situation has changed too: few people born after 1985 speak Brabantine anymore. One of the reasons is that their parents and grand-parents had been raised to be ashamed of their mother tongue. Standard Dutch was long propagated as ‘Common Civilised Dutch’ (Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands), the local languages being considered uncivilised, boorish corruptions – while they existed long before Standard Dutch was developed.
As children are raised in Standard Dutch and the languages of North Brabant are still stigmatised as being uncivilised and not worth passing down, the dialects are expected to go extinct in the 21st century.
As I’m 34 years old now, I was born in a generation that wasn’t raised with Brabantine. My parents speak Dutch with Brabantine influences, but my grand-parents (born in the 1920s) were highly proficient speakers of Brabantine – in fact, they were part of a generation that could hardly speak Standard Dutch. They were born in the village of Drunen, in the north of the central light blue area of kèènd. I was their klèènkèènd, ‘grand-child’.
When studying linguistics at Utrecht University, I became interested in their language. I did my master’s thesis about the changes the dialects of my home region underwent during the 20th century. Afterwards, I started writing a grammar.
As I had passively picked up my grand-parents’ Drunen dialect during the many holidays I spent with them, I was able to acquire most of it in my twenties. I have fond memories of interrogating my maternal grand-mother about her language during the four years before she passed away at the age of 93 (2019). I’d now call myself a peculiar mixture of a native speaker and a second-language speaker.
If you’ve reached this point, thank you very much for reading my post!
