The Sittard dialect ( nl, Sittards, li, Zittesj, german: Selfkanter Platt, in reference to the variety used in Germany) is a

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 and in the neig ...

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that ...

spoken mainly in the Dutch city of

Sittard Sittard (; ) is a city in the Netherlands, situated in the southernmost province of Limburg. The town is part of the municipality of Sittard-Geleen and has almost 37.500 inhabitants in 2016. In its east, Sittard borders the German municipal ...

. It is also spoken in Koningsbosch and in a small part of

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG),, is a country in Central Europe. It is the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany lies between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the sou ...

( Selfkant), but quickly becoming extinct there. Of all other important Limburgish dialects, the dialect of Sittard is most closely related to that of the .

Characteristics

The Sittard dialect belongs to , which means it has a

postalveolar consonant Postalveolar or post-alveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the ''back'' of the alveolar ridge. Articulation is farther back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but ...

at the

onset Onset may refer to: * Onset (audio), the beginning of a musical note or sound * Onset, Massachusetts, village in the United States **Onset Island (Massachusetts), a small island located at the western end of the Cape Cod Canal *Interonset interval ...

of words beginning with clusters such as ''sl'' and ''st'', in contrast with other variants of Limburgish such as

Maastrichtian The Maastrichtian () is, in the ICS geologic timescale, the latest age (uppermost stage) of the Late Cretaceous Epoch or Upper Cretaceous Series, the Cretaceous Period or System, and of the Mesozoic Era or Erathem. It spanned the interv ...

and in Dutch. The most important characteristic which distinguishes the dialect of Sittard from adjacent Limburgish dialects is the so-called Sittard diphthongization, i.e. the replacement of the close-mid monophthongs , and with the wide

diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...

s , and in some words such as ''neit'' ("not", originally ''neet'' ), ''zuike'' ("to search", originally ''zeuke'' ) and ''bloud'' ("blood", originally ''blood'' ). It resembles the Polder Dutch phenomenon in Standard Dutch, though it is extended to the environment before (where an epenthetic schwa is inserted before the consonant), as in ''beier'' ("beer"). This phenomenon was first examined thoroughly in the first half of the 1940s by Willy Dols, who showed that this Sittard diphthongization typically occurred in syllables with a push tone. New research at the beginning of the 21st century has shown that the diphthongization once served to emphasize the difference in

vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word ...

which distinguishes syllables with a push tone from those with a dragging tone.

Phonology

Vowels

* is restricted to unstressed syllables.

Consonants

Pitch accent

As many other Limburgish dialects, the Sittard dialect features a contrastive

pitch accent A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ...

, with minimal pairs such as ''goud'' 'gold' (featuring the push tone) vs. ''goud'' 'good' (featuring the dragging tone, transcribed as a high tone). The push tone is realized as a rising-falling contour in the declarative pattern, whereas the dragging tone varies between rising (when the sentence focus falls on the syllable that is non-final) and a shallow rising-falling contour when the syllable is sentence-final. The distinction between the two tones is neutralized outside of the sentence focus. In interrogative sentences, the distinction is always made., cited in

References

Bibliography

* * Culture of Limburg (Netherlands) East Limburgish dialects Languages of the Netherlands Low Franconian languages Sittard-Geleen {{Netherlands-stub