Estimating the Level and Direction of Phonetic Dialect Change in the Northern Netherlands

This article reports ongoing investigations into phonetic change of dialect groups in the northern Netherlandic language area, particularly the Frisian and Low Saxon dialect groups, which are known to differ in vitality. To achieve this, we combine existing phonetically transcribed corpora with dialectometric approaches that allow us to quantify change among older male dialect speakers in a real-time framework. A multidimensional variant of the Levenshtein distance, combined with methods that induce realistic phonetic distances between transcriptions, is used to estimate how much dialect groups have changed between 1990 and 2010, and whether they changed towards Standard Dutch or away from it. Our analyses indicate that language change is a slow process in this geographical area. Moreover, the Frisian and Groningen dialect groups seem to be most stable, while the other Low Saxon varieties (excluding the Groningen dialect group) were shown to be most prone to change. We offer possible explanations for our findings, while we discuss shortcomings of the data and approach in detail, as well as desiderata for future research

Estimating the level and direction of aggregated sound change of dialects in the Northern Netherlands

This article reports investigations into sound change at the community-level of Frisian and Low Saxon dialect groups in the north of the Netherlands, which differ in key factors influencing dialect decline. We combine phonetically transcribed corpora with dialectometric approaches that can quantify change among older male dialect speakers in a real-time framework. A multidimensional variant of the Levenshtein distance, combined with methods that induce realistic distances between sounds, is used to estimate how much dialect groups converged to and diverged from Standard Dutch between 1990 and 2010. Our analyses indicate that sound change is a slow process in this geographical area. The Frisian and North Low Saxon dialect groups seem to be most stable, while Westphalian Low Saxon varieties seem to be most prone to change. We offer possible explanations for our findings and discuss shortcomings of the data and approach in detail