Pronunciation of the Dutch plural (was: German spelling reform)

On Mon, 9 Aug 1999, dirk elzinga wrote:

> I suppose it also depends on the generation then. My mother, who is from
> Amsterdam, has a nasalized schwa or a schwa-n sequence.
And on the dialect - Amsterdam speech is very nasal in general. And
on current fashion, i.e. what they speak on television. I don't
follow the media much (don't have a TV, use the radio only
occasionally for music, read the papers but they don't talk :-) so I
wouldn't know what it's like now except that shouting seems to be the
fashion.

Some ten years ago everyone on television spoke with a "Goois" accent
(from the region where Hilversum is, a lot of very affluent and
fashionable villages). This made [r] (apico-alveolar, the standard of
the fifties and sixties) go out almost completely, and its allophone
[R] (velar, the de facto default for about 60% of the Dutch
population) partially, being replaced with a kind of uvular glide
that I couldn't reproduce or find the ASCII for. Horrible.

> However, I seem
> to recall that when I was in the Netherlands as an exchange student, the
> prevalent pronunciation was as a nasalized schwa.
When was this?

> Of course this could
> have a couple of explanations: 1) being a foreigner (in spite of my
> name!) people were careful to speak slowly and clearly, which might also
> include spelling pronunciation;
Could be, but you'd get [@n] rather than [@~].

> 2) I was in Tilburg, which is a
> different dialect area from Noord Holland;
Plausible; my soon-to-be-ex-brother-in-law also talks like that and
he's from Oosterhout (near Breda). Makes people sound as if they're
constantly whining, to me; I wouldn't want to live in Brabant, I'd
get depressed in no time.

> 3) since most of my
> interaction was with other university students, the pronunciation of
> <-en> as nasalized schwa or as schwa-n might be part of an academic
> speech register.
Doesn't sound very plausible. I can imagine that people might talk
through the nose as an affectation, but they'd do it all the time and
not just in the -en ending.

I intended to listen to people, but I was in Rotterdam with the kids
and though we talked a lot (not only among ourselves) I didn't really
have time for it. Anyway, what they speak in Rotterdam is something
entirely different - so much that my youngest (almost four) asked if
we were in another country, because the people talked different and
the pedestrian traffic lights made a different noise.

   Irina

            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
       http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
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