Hasselt dialect

Hasselt dialect or Hasselt Limburgish (natively , Standard Dutch: ) is the city dialect and variant of Limburgish spoken in the Belgian city of Hasselt alongside the Dutch language. All of its speakers are bilingual with standard Dutch.

Phonology

Consonants

* Obstruents are devoiced word-finally. However, when the next word starts with a vowel and is pronounced without a pause, both voiced and voiceless word-final obstruents are realized as voiced.
* are bilabial, whereas are labiodental. is a bilabial approximant . In this article, it is transcribed with , following the recommendations of Carlos Gussenhoven regarding transcribing the corresponding Standard Dutch phone.
* In the palatal sequences , the affricates tend to be realized as palatalized stops. Affricates are used in other positions and, in the case of conservative speakers, also in .
* is often dropped, though this is not marked in transcriptions in this article.

Realization of

According to , is realized as a voiced trill, either uvular or alveolar . Between vowels, it is sometimes realized with one contact (i.e. as a tap) , whereas word-finally, it can be devoiced to .. While the author does not state that explicitly, he uses the symbol for many instances of the word-final .

According to , about two thirds of speakers have a uvular , whereas about one third has a categorical alveolar . There are also a few speakers who mix uvular and alveolar articulations.

Among uvular articulations, he lists uvular trill , uvular fricative trill , uvular fricative and uvular approximant , which are used more or less equally often in all contexts. Almost all speakers with a uvular use all four of these realizations.

Among alveolar articulations, he lists alveolar tap , voiced alveolar fricative , alveolar approximant , voiceless alveolar trill , alveolar tapped or trilled fricative , voiceless alveolar tap and voiceless alveolar fricative . Among these, the tap is most common, whereas the tapped/trilled fricative is the second most common realization.

Elsewhere in the article, the consonant is transcribed for the sake of consistency with IPA transcriptions of other dialects of Limburgish.

Vowels

* The Hasselt dialect has undergone both the Old Saxon monophthongization (which has turned the older and into and ) and the monophthongization of the former and to and (which was then mostly merged with due to the unrounding described below).
* Among the marginal vowels, the nasal ones occur only in French loanwords (note that is typically transcribed with in transcriptions of French and that is very rare, as in Standard Dutch), whereas is restricted to loanwords from standard Dutch and English. As in about 50 other dialects spoken in Belgian Limburg, the rounded front vowels have largely been replaced with their unrounded counterparts and are mostly restricted to loanwords from French. The marginal diphthong occurs only in loanwords from French and interjections. is also rare, and like occurs only in the word-final position.
* Phonetically, is near-front .
* All of the back vowels are almost fully back. Among these, and the non-native are rounded, whereas are unrounded.
* Before alveolar consonants, the long monophthongs and the diphthongs are realized as centering diphthongs . In the case of , this happens only before sonorants, with the disyllabic being an alternative pronunciation. Thus, 'distress', 'fashion', 'news', 'cool' and 'tired' surface as , , , and . The distinction between a long monophthong and a centering diphthong is only phonemic in the case of the pair, as exemplified by the minimal pair 'broad' vs. 'plank'.
* are mid .
** occurs only in unstressed syllables.
* is near-open, whereas are open.
* and have somewhat advanced first elements ( and , respectively). The latter diphthong occurs only in the word-final position.
* Among the closing-fronting diphthongs, the ending points of and tend to be closer to than ; in addition, the first element of is closer to : .

There are three combinations of long monophthongs with coda - those are , and , with the latter two occurring only in the word-final position, as in 'harm' (pl.) and 'drawer'. An example word for the sequence is 'unwillingly'.

Stress and tone

The location of stress is the same as in Belgian Standard Dutch. In compound nouns, the stress is sometimes shifted to the second element (the head noun), as in ''stadhäös'' 'town hall'. Loanwords from French sometimes preserve the original final stress.

As many other Limburgish dialects, the Hasselt dialect features a phonemic pitch accent, a distinction between the 'push tone' () and the 'dragging tone' (). It can be assumed that the latter is a lexical low tone, whereas the former is lexically toneless. Examples of words differing only by pitch accent include 'hen' vs. 'them' as well as 'mountains' vs. 'mountain'. Phonetically, the push tone rises then falls (, ), whereas the dragging tone falls, then rises, then falls again (, ). This phonetic realization of pitch accent is called ''Rule 0'' by Björn Köhnlein. Elsewhere in the article, the broad transcription is used even in phonetic transcription.

A unique feature of this dialect is that all stressed syllables can bear either of the accents, even the CVC syllables with a non-sonorant coda. In compounds, all combinations of pitch accent are possible: 'Old Street', 'Fish Market', 'Oak Street' and 'Fruit Market'.

Sample

The sample text is a reading of the first sentence of The North Wind and the Sun.
:"The north wind and the sun were discussing which of the two was the strongest. Just then someone came past who had a thick, warm, winter coat on."

Phonetic transcription:
:

Orthographic version:
:

References

Bibliography

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Further reading

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Hasselt
Languages of Belgium
Limburg (Belgium)
Low Franconian languages
West Limburgish dialects
Germanic phonologies