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• 1 2021-09-01T20:19:16+00:00 Chapter 3: The Sounds of Dutch, by Sophie Compton 109 plain 2021-12-15T21:56:21+00:00

  About The Language

  Dutch is a language of The Netherlands, with glottocode NLD. Colloquially, it is called Nederlands. It is a part of the Indo-European and Germanic language families, specifically of the branch of West Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, Frisian, and English. Dutch also has a daughter language, called Afrikaans, which is spoken in South Africa. Additionally, Dutch is one of the official languages of Belgium as well. Below is a chart showing how the Dutch language arose from Germanic languages.
  
  
  According to Ethnologue, there are an estimated 24 million native speakers of Dutch worldwide, with 16 million of those 24 million who live in The Netherlands. Below is a world map of speakers of Dutch, including speakers of Afrikaans, its daughter language, and non-native speakers as well. Many speakers of Dutch are bilingual with languages like English, German, and French.

  

  By commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User: Getsnoopy CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
  In this photo, the dark blue represents native speakers, the medium blue represents speakers of Afrikaans, and the light blue represents non-native speakers.

   

  Consonants

  There are around 21 consonants in Dutch depending on the speaker. Here is an International Phonetic Alphabet chart representing the consonants of Dutch.

  Dutch has 8 places and 6 manners of articulation. The places are bilabial, labiodental, alveolar, postalveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, and glottal. The manners are plosive, nasal, tap, fricative, approximant, and lateral approximant. Below is a recording of minimal pair words in Dutch that prove that these sounds exist in Dutch as phonemes, not allophones. A minimal pair is a word that is phonetically identical except for one sound. The minimal pairs used in this recording are: /pɔt/ and /bɔt/, /tɛ/ and /dɛ/, /kok/ and /xok/, /mar/ and /nar/, /van/ and /vaŋ/, /ʀɔt/ and /lɔt/, /harən/ and /halən/, /ʋar/ and /jar/, /wɪnt/ and /ʋint/, and /xat/ and /hat/. This shows that the sounds /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /x/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /ʀ/, /l/, /r/, /ʋ/, /j/, /w/, and /h/ are all phonemes of Dutch.
  
  
  In a separate recording, we get the minimal pairs: /ʋel/ and /fel/ and /dɔf/ and /dɔs/, proving that /f/ and /s/ are phonemes of Dutch.
  
  
  While there are more consonants than this in Dutch, these were the ones present in the word list recordings from the UCLA phonetics lab archive. There are a few sounds that are disputed by different sources, but this list is comprised of the ones typically agreed on.

   

  Vowels

  There are 13 vowels and 3 diphthongs in Dutch. The vowels are /i/, /y/, /u/, /e/, /Y/, /o/, /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /ə/, /ø/, /ɔ/, /a/, and /ɑ/. The Dipthongs are /ɛi/, /œy/, and /əu/. Below is a vowel chart from Gert Booij's The Phonetics of Dutch, 1995, showing the vowels of Dutch.

  
  
  Here is a recording of a Dutch speaker using all of the vowels used in Dutch. These are also minimal pairs to prove that these are phonemes and not allophones. The Dutch speaker says /tin/, /tɪn/, /ten/, /tɛn/, /tun/, /ton/, /tɔn/, /tal/, /tɑl/, /dyr/, /dʏr/, and /dør/.
  

  Allophones

  In any given language, an allophone is a sound used in a language that does not change the meaning of a word, but is used as a substitute only under certain circumstances. According to Booij 1995, /d/ alternates with [ʋ] or [j] before a schwa (ə), and alternates with [ø] after a diphthong. The sound /ŋ/ is replaced with the combination /ŋk/ when it is the final consonant in a word. Additionally, long vowels such as /a/, /o/, /i/, /y/, and /u/ are lengthened before /r/. The sounds /s/, /z/, /t/, and /n/ get palatalized before /j/. These are all examples of different kinds of allophonic variation. An interesting thing to note about Dutch is that depending on the speaker, /r/ may be replaced by /ʀ/, /ʁ/, /ɹ/, or /ɾ/. Therefore, these are also allophonic variations of /r/. The vowel /ə/ also gets more centralized and closed to be pronounced as /ʊ/ before a nasal.

   

  Syllables and Syllable Structure

  The syllable structure of Dutch is (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C), meaning that it must contain at least one vowel per syllable, but at most there can be three consonants in the onset and four consonants in the coda. Some examples of possible combinations would be CVC, CVCCC, CCVC, and so on. In Dutch, sonority of consonants typically decreases towards the edges of a syllable, where they follow this pattern of decreasing sonority: glide, liquid, nasal, obstruent (Booij, 1995). Standard Dutch also only includes vowels as nuclei. In some dialects of Dutch, /j/ could also be considered a syllable nucleus, but this is not the case for standard Dutch. Dutch onsets can contain zero to three sounds, but in cases where it contains three sounds, the initial phoneme is always /s/. Because of this rule, Dutch has a large number of words that start with an S-blend. Onsets that contain one or two sounds can be made of any other consonant. Some examples of their syllable structure include the word /tin/ (ten) that uses the CVC structure, the word /sɪnts/ (since), which uses the CVCCC structure, and the word /ɣɾot/ (big), which uses the CCVC syllable structure.

  Focus on Vowel Length

  An interesting feature of Dutch is that it has some elongated vowels. However, only certain vowels can be elongated. In Dutch, the vowels /a/, /o/, /ø/, and /e/ are typically elongated. The reason for this is because the duration of a vowel is used in order to distinguish which vowel is being heard. An example of this distinction can be used in the words /man/ and /maːn/, meaning man and moon. Without the elongated vowel for the word "moon", Dutch speakers would not be able to distinguish between these two words. Dutch vowels come in long and short pairs: /aː/ and /ɑ/, /oː/ and /ɔ/, /øː/ and /œ/, and /eː/ and /ɪ/. The only exception to that rule is if a vowel comes before /r/. In that instance, the other vowels in this pair system can also be elongated (Nooteboom, S. G., and I. H. Slis, 1972). The vowels that do not participate in having long and short pairs are /ɛ/, /u/, /y/, and /i/. This is because /ɛ/ is always considered short phonetically, and /u/, /y/, and /i/ are considered short unless put before /r/.

  
  Here is an image comparison of a long vowel versus a short vowel using Praat software so that the differences between the two are easily illustrated. The words compared are the short version of /a/ from /tafəl/ and the long version of /a/ from /laːt/. Below is also a recording of the words to that the difference can be seen and heard as well.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This photo is the spectrum for the word /laːt/. The vowel in the word is highlighted in order to easily be identified. The vowel in this word lasts 0.308 seconds
  

  This photo is the spectrum for the word /tafəl/. The vowel in the word is also highlighted. However, this vowel only lasts 0.217 seconds, which is 0.091 seconds shorter than the other vowel. This clearly shows the difference between a long and a short vowel in Dutch. Additionally, since the vowels produced are the same vowel, the formants are nearly identical.

  Works Cited and Bibliography

  Booij, Geert. The Phonology of Dutch. Oxford University Press, 1999.
  
  “Dutch.” Ethnologue, https://www-ethnologue-com.libproxy.siue.edu/language/nld.
  
  “Dutch.” UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive, http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/NLD/nld.html.
  
  “Germanic Language Tree.” Wikipedia, 14 July 2006, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Germanictree.PNG. Accessed 8 Dec. 2021.
  
  Getsnoopy. “Map of the Dutch World.” Wikipedia, 12 Oct. 2021, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110938216. Accessed 8 Dec. 2021.

  Mennen, Ineke & Levelt, Clara & Gerrits, Ellen. (2006). Acquisition of Dutch phonology: an overview. 
  
  Nooteboom, S. G., and I. H. Slis. “The Phonetic Feature of Vowel Length in Dutch.” Language & Speech, vol. 15, no. 4, Oct. 1972, pp. 301–316. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1177/002383097201500401.
  
  Steven Moran and Daniel McCloy and Richard Wright. 2019. Dutch sound inventory (PH).
  In: Moran, Steven & McCloy, Daniel (eds.)
  PHOIBLE 2.0.