Dutch Study Group

[tungemål]

Yes, the same in Norwegian. I still make de/het mistakes in Dutch.

[Le Baron]

Yes, the same in Norwegian. I still make de/het mistakes in Dutch.

So do I! When In ask a Dutch person 'is it de or het?' Many stop first and then try it out with both to see which 'feels' right. Probably running through thousands of examples they've heard. It's usually the right answer.

[tungemål]

Fun fact: some nouns in Norwegian haven't evolved any gender that is agreed upon. Maybe also in Dutch. For instance et/en kjeks (cookie).

Woord is neuter just like in Norwegian. But I don't get automatic transfer between the languages, maybe because Norwegian uses a system of noun declension (or suffix) instead of a definite article: het woord - ordet.

And the indefinite article doesn't show gender: een woord.

[Le Baron]

Good one from Easy Dutch about language differences between north/south. 'Jeroen' talks a bit slow, but the girl speaks at a fairly regular tempo. tungemål can note two things here from previous discussions: that even though Jeroen says (correctly) that they have much more of a tendency in the south to pronounce final 'n', he doesn't always do it himself when speaking here; also the so-called 'Gooise R' is as you can you see a regional thing..which has been picked up in media world. Though most people don't use it.

Friet of patat? People here in Utrecht say both. Perhaps 'patat' more in reference to the thing, but when talking about the place you get them always tend to say: 'een friet'tent'.

[tommus]

These Easy Dutch YouTube videos are well done and quite interesting.

[ghen]

Hi

I'm a native Dutch speaker from Belgium (Flanders). Happy to help if needed!

And the indefinite article doesn't show gender: een woord.

FWIW: some dialects, like Antwerpian/Brabantian, retained an archaic distinction between male and female (!) indefinite articles: een koe (f), ne stier (m), een tafel (f), ne stoel (m). But this distinction completely disappeared in standard Dutch, and speakers of other dialects are usually not aware of it.

[tommus]

Welcome ghen. It's great to have native Dutch speakers in LLorg. I have a couple of questions for you.
I have always wondered how, in two relatively small countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) that so many local dialects have survived so well. How can they survive amongst the universal use of standard Dutch?
It is also interesting to see the differences between standard Dutch in the two countries. For example, "baan" and "job", amongst many others. It is like saying "truck" in the US and Canada, but when we travel in the UK, we try to say "lorry". When you go to the Netherlands, would you say "baan" instead or "job"? Probably everyone knows all these different words, but what do you do in practice? Do you ever hear a word in the Netherlands you don't recognize?
One of the most difficult things for English-speaking natives to do is to not pronounce the final "n" in Dutch words ending in "en". It seems that when native Dutch speakers are reading text, they often do pronounce the final "n". As a native speaker, do you notice that? And the pronunciation is a bit different between the Netherlands and Belgium. It took me a couple of years to start to recognize that difference, especially on the TV news. But it is now quite easy to hear the difference. Do you hear that difference?
So again, welcome. It's great to have a Dutch speaking native to question about these sorts of things.

[ghen]

Hi,

Yes, Dutch has an exceptional dialectical variety for such a relatively small area. Interestingly, many isoglosses and dialect boundaries still coincide with former borders of medieval counties and duchies, not with present-day provinces, so these dialects go back quite far.

When speakers from Belgium and the Netherlands communicate, we do tend to adjust our pronunciation, and there are usually no significant problems when both speakers adapt (although we would still make fun of typical lexical differences, like the examples you gave). But a conversation between speakers of the same dialect (ie. when not adjusting their speech) can be very difficult to follow for speakers of another dialect, even within Belgium or the Netherlands. That's why colloquial speech, eg. street interviews, will often have subtitles on TV (see this classic sketch).

We do drop final -n, except when preceding a vowel or specific consonants (like d, t, b), in which case we may even insert -n. Eg. articles "de", "ne" (dialectical male variant of "een") can become "den", "nen": "een boer", "de boer" (a/the farmer) becomes "nen boer", "den boer", but this is non-standard, you will never hear this on TV news.
Other non-standard but commonly heard drops are "da's goe" instead of "dat is goed".
But like you observed, when we read a text out loud, pronunciation will much more closely match the spelling. I would think that goes for other languages as well?

[Le Baron]

Dutch and Afrikaans on Ecolinguist. There's a really comfortable overlap between the languages.

[tastyonions]

My neighbor is a native Afrikaans speaker and even with my very weak Dutch I can understand a decent amount of what he says to his young son.