Flemish/Dutch dialectology

[Eduard Selleslagh]

[ Subject: changed by moderator ]

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2001 9:01 PM

> Despite my stupid wording, the polyglot character of life in the Low
> Countries is still an interesting phenomenon, which may help us understand
> potential parallels in other times and places.

> Peter

[Ed Selleslagh]
It sure is interesting, maybe even more than you seem to think:

You were considering the use of other European languages, but there is more:
the sometimes very divergent Flemish/Dutch dialects (Ingwaeonic/Frisian/West-
Flemish, Brabants, Hollands, Saxon, Limburgs...) can be as different among
themselves as Castilian, Catalan and Portuguese, possibly more. Their genesis -
and later partial convergence and mixing - may shed some light on the
mechanisms underlying differentiation of PIE.

Some of these dialects are e.g. strongly palatalizing, velarizing, or
diphtongation-prone, others are not or in a different way. Verb forms may
differ subastantially, e.g. absence of 'ge-' in Saxon participles, preservation
of verbs as 'strong' etc...And all that in an area like three times
Massachusetts (Flanders - 6 million out of 21 million native Dutch speakers -
is a bit smaller than that state).

I got the impression - rightly or wrongly - that most of the litterature on the
subject is largely descriptive, or concerned with the problems of bilingualism
(official Dutch-local dialect) or the emergence of the modern standard
language.

Ed.