Hamont-Achel dialect ( nl, Hamonts-Achels, li, Haëmets-Achels) or Hamont-Achel Limburgish is the
city dialect and variant of
Limburgish
Limburgish ( li, Limburgs or ; nl, Limburgs ; german: Limburgisch ; french: Limbourgeois ), also called Limburgan, Limburgian, or Limburgic, is a West Germanic language spoken in the Dutch and Belgian provinces of Limburg (Netherlands), L ...
spoken in the
Belgian
Belgian may refer to:
* Something of, or related to, Belgium
* Belgians, people from Belgium or of Belgian descent
* Languages of Belgium, languages spoken in Belgium, such as Dutch, French, and German
*Ancient Belgian language, an extinct languag ...
city of
Hamont-Achel
Hamont-Achel (; li, Haëmet-Achel) is a city and municipality located in the Belgian province of Limburg. It was founded in 1977 by a fusion of the city Hamont and the village Achel. On January 1, 2020, Hamont-Achel had a total population of 14. ...
alongside the
Dutch language
Dutch ( ) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-Europea ...
(with which it is not mutually intelligible).
Native speakers of the dialect tend to call it either ''Haëmets'' or ''Achels'', depending on where they are from (the former city of Hamont or the former village of Achel).
Phonology
The following section describes the dialect as it is spoken in Hamont.
Consonants
* are
bilabial
In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips.
Frequency
Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tli ...
, whereas are
labiodental
In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants Place of articulation, articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth.
Labiodental consonants in the IPA
The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
The IPA c ...
.
*The word-initial cluster can be realized as .
* do not occur as frequently as in many other dialects, and can be said to be marginal phonemes.
* is a
uvular trill
The voiced uvular trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a small capital letter ''R''. This consonant is one of several collectively ...
. Word-finally it is devoiced to either a fricative or a fricative trill .
*Other allophones include . They appear in contexts similar to Belgian Standard Dutch.
*Voiceless consonants are regressively
assimilated. An example of this is the past tense of regular verbs, where voiceless stops and fricatives are voiced before the past tense morpheme .
*Word-final voiceless consonants are voiced in intervocalic position.
Vowels
The Hamont-Achel dialect contains 22 monophthong and 13 diphthong phonemes. The amount of monophthongs is higher than that of consonants.
Monophthongs
On average, long vowels are 95 ms longer than short vowels. This is very similar to Belgian Standard Dutch, in which the difference is 105 ms.
The quality of the monophthongs is as follows:
* are similar to the corresponding cardinal vowels , but none of them are quite as peripheral.
* Among the front rounded vowels, , and are phonetically central like and : (), whereas and are front , similar to the corresponding cardinal vowels. is
near-close and slightly advanced from the central position. The phonetic distance between it and the close-mid is not very great; the same has been reported in the Ripuarian
dialect of Kerkrade spoken on the
Germany–Netherlands border
The Germany–Netherlands border (; ) consists of a land and maritime border across the Dollart through the Frisian Islands into the North Sea.
Land border
The border is located in the northwestern part of Germany and the east of the Netherla ...
. At the same time, is phonetically similar to the unstressable and the two differ mainly in rounding.
* is similar to , but it is lower and slightly more central ().
* The contrast between the long open vowels is a genuine front–central–back contrast as is open front .
* The short and are somewhat higher and more front () than their long counterparts.
Monophthong-glide combinations
Unlike in the neighboring dialect of Weert, all monophthong-glide combinations are restricted to the
syllable coda
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Phone (phonetics), speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered t ...
. Those are mostly preceded by a vowel, and they are and the marginal . There also are two combinations of a vowel followed by , which are and .
Diphthongs
Dialect of Hamont-Achel contrasts long and short closing diphthongs. The long ones are on average 70 ms longer than their short equivalents. Centering diphthongs are all long.
* The starting points of are close to the corresponding cardinal vowels .
* The starting point of is near-open central .
* The ending points of are rather close, more like than .
* The ending point of is slightly more open () than those of the other closing diphthongs.
* The starting points of and are more central than the corresponding cardinal vowels: .
* The target of the centering diphthongs is a rather close schwa .
* The starting points of are somewhat lower () than the corresponding cardinal vowels.
* The starting point of is somewhat lower and somewhat more central () than the corresponding cardinal vowel.
* The starting point of is somewhat higher and somewhat more central () than the corresponding cardinal vowel.
Prosody
Like most other Limburgish dialects, but unlike some other dialects in this area, the prosody of the Hamont-Achel dialect has a lexical tone distinction, which is traditionally referred to as ''stoottoon'' ('push tone') or ''Accent 1'', which generally has a shortening effect on the syllable and ''sleeptoon'' ('dragging tone') or ''Accent 2''. As in other articles, the latter is transcribed as a high tone, whereas the former is not marked. The difference between Accent 1 and Accent 2 can signal either lexical differences or grammatical distinctions, such as those between the singular and the plural forms of some nouns. It is phonemic only in stressed syllables, an example of a minimal pair is '(record) sleeve' vs. 'house'.
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
*
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hamont-Achel Dialect
Hamont-Achel
Languages of Belgium
Limburg (Belgium)
Low Franconian languages
West Limburgish dialects
City colloquials