Re: Dutch-like language [OT]

On 5/12/2024 5:24 am, Liz Tuddenham wrote:

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
 

On 3/12/2024 11:59 pm, Liz Tuddenham wrote:

Last night in the 80-metre band I heard two 'hams' talking.  The vowel
sounds of their voices seemed to be characteristically Dutch (an accent
like the Groningen area) but the language was completely
incomprehensible.  I listened for several minutes but didn't hear a
single word I recognised
>
Do any of our Dutch contributors know of some dialect that is Dutch in
sound but does not use the standard Dutch language?
>
[I tried to send this to Jan by e-mail but the address I found for him
on the Web just bounced.]

>
As Jan said, it could have been Fries. To German's Dutch sounds like yet
another low German dialect.
>
The historical reality is that Dutch was the dominant German dialect in
northern Europe during the Dutch golden age, and high German is the
Prussian dialect spoken at the court of Frederick the Great - he
preferred to use French - which got enforced as the official court
language in the countries Prussian came to rule. The other low German
dialects still persist as local dialects.

 There are some distinctive sounds in modern Dutch which can identify it
to a non-Dutch speaker, particularly the accent in the NE provinces.
They were present in this QSO but the words didn't sound like any Dutch
I have ever heard (or German, or French or any other European language).

You need a phonetician.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology
The international phonetic alphabet lists about 200 distinct phonemes and human languages all use different subsets of them, lumping some together and treating them as if they were identical.
There are phonological contour maps of the Netherlands which show which provinces tend to make particular choices.
Looking for "distinctive sounds" is over-simplifying task.
As legg has pointed out there is a South African variant of Dutch, spoken by the Boers. It's called Afrikaans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaans
I'm not familiar with it, but my psycholinguist wife had had some exposure to it.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney