Frans Hinskens

• Professor
• Senior Researcher at Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen

In this article, I discuss the background, the considerations and some of the main policy recommendations of a recent advisory text. This text has been commissioned by the central intergovernmental body which counsels the Dutch, Flemish and Surinamese governments in policy matters concerning the Dutch language. The advisory text focuses on question...

The results of a content analysis of the programs of the first ten in situ editions of the conference. The notes I made for the oral presentation are included in this document. To access them, click the tiny symbol in the top left corner of the slides

The Continuity of Linguistic Change presents a collection of selected papers in honour of Professor Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda. The essays revolve around the study of linguistic variation and the mechanisms and processes associated with linguistic change, a field to which Villena-Ponsoda has dedicated so many years of research. The authors are res...

R-pronouns are R-words which feature as pronouns in prepositional phrases (among other things). They are common in Dutch and German (e.g., D. daarmee, G. damit, lit. ‘therewith’, ‘with that’, D. erna, G. danach, lit. ‘hereafter’, ‘after this’). This contribution concerns a quantitative study of variation in R-pronouns in modern Moroccan and Turkish...

KHALID MOURIGH is another co-author of this chapter, but there is no way to add his name to the list of authors...

a famous sound change in the history of Dutch

This contribution sketches the aims, participant recruitment and methodology of the Sprekend Nederland project, the amount and types of data, the research possibilities they offer and suggestions for similar future projects.

The days when dialectology was a quiet island in the (sometimes rough) ocean of modern linguistics seem to be over. Since the so-called social turn and the integration of quantitative methods into the study of urban as well as rural dialects, the barriers between early ‘Labovian’ sociolinguistics and dialectology have gradually been broken down. Of...

Our research on variation in the expression of grammatical gender (in determiners and adnominal inflection) in present-day ethnolectal Dutch is based on interactional speech data collected among 10–12 and 18–20-year-old male adolescents with Turkish, Moroccan and non-immigrant Dutch backgrounds, born and raised in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam or N...

For decades, the study of sound change (SC) was the domain of what we would now call historical linguistics, with dialectology joining in after the 1880s, followed by early instrumental phonetics and structuralist phonology in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter ventures a rough and necessarily incomplete summary of the state of p...

Issues in multilingualism and its implications for communities and society at large, language acquisition and use, language diversification, and creative language use associated with new linguistic identities have become hot topics in both scientific and popular debates. A ubiquitous aspect of multilingualism is language contact. This book contains...

The papers in this volume address the interplay of factors underlying the formation of intermediate varieties in the ‘dialect-standard’ landscape of present-day Europe. Research is presented on varieties of several different languages (Norwegian, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek), on speech communities with different (geo)political and sociol...

Standard Dutch is an official language in the Netherlands, in the northern part of Belgium (Flanders and Brussels) and in very multilingual Surinam. The standardisation process started in the early 16th century; because of the political separation of the Seventeen Provinces after 1585, it came to a halt in the South (roughly present-day Flanders)....

Een varifocale kijk op taalvariatie en taalcontact

How do young bilingual speakers of current Turkish and Moroccan ethnolects of Dutch deal with phoneme contrasts that do not exist in their heritage languages and that are at the same time subject to regional and social variation in the Dutch speech community at large, such as that between Dutch phonemes /a:/ and /α/? Data from speakers from the Ams...

Return to sender. The development of a polyvalent Virgin Islands Dutch Creole pronoun from the 18th until the 20th century In 1995 we demonstrated the pronoun sender (originally West Flemish, 3PL subject) and phonetic variants underwent polygrammaticalization in VIDC. Twenty years later a large number of Dutch Creole texts from the earliest and la...

We studied the apparent time change of dialect areas on the basis of data of 86 local dialects of Dutch and Frisian that we collected in the period 2008-2011. In each location, recordings were made of two older male speakers and two younger female speakers. Using the transcriptions, we calculated linguistic distances among the speakers and classifi...

Sprekend Nederland is a large-scale effort to document the variability of Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands anno 2016. A smartphone app was created to record the speech of as many speakers of Dutch as possible, as well as their attitudes (perceptions and evaluations) towards other participants's speech. Initiated by the national broadcast organisa...

Ethnolect features typically have different origins. In emerging ethnolects, features are moreover in flux and structural relations between variable phenomena have not yet fully crystallized, so that the strict co-occurrence, conjunction or disjunction between variants is probably rare. In this contribution we focus on the co-variation of a range o...

We recorded older male speakers and younger female speakers of 86 local dialects of Dutch. Using these data, we analyze and visualize the influence of standard Dutch on apparent time changes in these dialects. Focusing for the most part on variation in the sound components, we test whether (I) dialect change is mainly the result of convergence to s...

How do speakers of current Turkish and Moroccan ethnolects of Dutch deal with phonemes that do not exist in their heritage languages and that are at the same time subject to pronounced regional and social variation in the Dutch speech community at large, such as the Dutch diphthong /εi/? This diphthong does not occur in Turkish and Berber and it oc...

In Afrikaans, medial /g/, /v/, and /d/ have often been lenited or deleted, sometimes giving rise to alternations or the restructuring of stem forms. After an analysis of the distribution of the processes, some of the morphological consequences are briefly sketched. In order to find out more about the determinants of the lenition or deletion process...

Modern colloquial standard Dutch has a number of features involving non-standard inflection (verbal, adnominal, pronominal; involving gender, person, number and case), which appear to participate in ongoing processes of deflection. We focus on ten constructions, nine of which concern non-standard inflection. After discussing each phenomenon from th...

Convergence, i.e. the increase of inter-systemic similarities, is usually considered the default development in language contact situations. This volume focuses on the other logical possibilities of diachronic development, namely stability and divergence – two well-attested, but under-researched phenomena. The contributions investigate the sociolin...

After a brief discussion of the concept of language variation, some of the main characteristics of ‘rule-based’ and usage-based paradigms are sketched, confined to the domain of phonological variation and its relation with syntax, morphology and the lexicon. Given the large number of different perspectives from which both approaches and their relat...

Rapidly increasing migration flows contribute to the development of multiple forms of social and cultural differentiation in urban areas – or to ‘super-diversity’. Language diversity is an important part of the resulting new social and cultural constellations. Although linguistic diversity is not a new phenomenon per se, the response of individuals...

Usage-based approaches constitute a young paradigm of linguistic thinking, contrasting with formal (especially generative) theory in that they do not assume language users to have at their disposal abstract grammatical knowledge, but rather to store detailed information about the words of their language each time they hear them. This contribution c...

In this paper we report on a dialectometrical study of dialect change at the lexical, morphological and sound component levels. In particular, recently collected fieldwork data on a reasonable number of different Dutch dialects have been analysed to trace the processes leading to their convergence and/or divergence. Then, using these data, we provi...

This contribution addresses a number of conceptual and methodological issues regarding processes of dialect change leading to koineization. After a discussion of some notions and key findings from a few recent relevant studies concerning present-day Dutch dialects, two paradigms of linguistic theorizing will be briefly presented. Next, these paradi...

The so-called Goeman-Taeldeman-Van Reenen Project (GTRP) consists of a large online database of 613 local dialects of Dutch on the basis of which the phonologies and morphologies of these dialects can be systematically compared. In this paper we present a quantitative investigation of an aspect of the reliability of the GTRP data. To this end, we p...

This paper is an impressionistic sketch of the language history of Amsterdam in the past five hundred years. To this end we discuss some of the main economic and demographic developments of the city and the political units that it has formed a part of, notably the County of Holland, the Republic of the United Netherlands and the Kingdom of the Neth...

K wantitatieve benaderingen in het taal-en letterkundig onderzoek. Een ruwe schets I Inleidend In deze thematische aflevering van het Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal-en Let-terkunde (TNTL) richten we de schijnwerpers op kwantitatieve benaderingen in taal-en letterkundig onderzoek. Er zijn op zijn minst drie goede redenen om dat eens te doen. Ten...

Limburg dialects of Dutch have a rule for voicing final obstruents across word boundaries ('sandhi voicing') which, unlike other varieties of Dutch, also applies systematically before adjacent vowels. As far as the prosodic domain is concerned: in a model in which a distinction is drawn between the prosodic constituents of, among other things, the...

This volume presents 16 original studies of variation in languages representing the three main European language families, as well as in varieties of Greek and Hungarian. The studies concern variation in or across dialects or dialect groups, in standard varieties or in emerging regional varieties of the standard. Several studies investigate a speci...

Dialects are constantly changing, and due to increased mobility in more recent years, European dialects have 'levelled', making it difficult to distinguish a native of Reading from a native of London, or a native of Bonn from a native of Cologne. This comprehensive study brings together a team of leading scholars to explore all aspects of recent di...

Dialects are constantly changing, and due to increased mobility in more recent years, European dialects have 'levelled', making it difficult to distinguish a native of Reading from a native of London, or a native of Bonn from a native of Cologne. This comprehensive study brings together a team of leading scholars to explore all aspects of recent di...

Introduction In this chapter, we will discuss the available evidence for Niedzielski and Giles' claim that ‘accommodation theory should be one of the major frameworks to which researchers in language change should turn’ (1996: 338). We will investigate the validity of a model of the implementation of structural language change which is intricately...

Introduction Dialect change can have several different manifestations. Among these, dialect convergence (dc) and dialect divergence (dd) noticeably affect the relationships between related dialects. Dc and dd have probably been present for as long as dialects have existed. Various historical developments, including the ‘modernisation’ of society, h...

It is well known that secondary articulation types, such as labialization and palatalization, as well as laryngeal modifications, such as aspiration and glottalization, can play a contrastive role in segment inventories. This article describes an investigation of such segmental modifications, whether laryngeal, supralaryngeal or nasal, on the basis...

Korte schets vooraf HET SCHANDAAL Gerrit Achterberg, die leefde van 1905 tot 1962, wordt algemeen gerekend tot de belangrijkste Nederlandse dichters van de 20e eeuw. Tijdens zijn leven was in kleine kring bekend dat Achterberg in zijn jonge jaren in een vlaag van verstandsverbijstering een vrouw vermoord had. Hij heeft daarvoor jarenlang in een psy...

Hypocoristische vormen en reductievormen in het hedendaagse Nederlands Frans Hinskens (Leipzig) 1. Inleiding Hypocoristische vormen van het type slomo, paddo, lesbo, Brabo, Limbo, maar ook bijvoorbeeld Zeebo en dombo vallen buiten het bereik van de regu-liere morfologie van de woordvorming. Dit geldt evenzeer voor reductievormen als bios, aso, homo...

La convergence et la divergence de dialectes, processus par lesquels des langues ou des varietes de langues acquierent plus de similitude ou plus de difference, sont etroitement liees a des questions de changement linguistique. Reflechir sur cette question a amene un groupe de chercheurs a etudier les points suivants : la variation telle qu'elle es...

Processes of dialect levelling reduce the linguistic ‘autonomy’ of individual dialects by leading to their structural convergence with related varieties. This contribution presents research into processes of dialect levelling in a Limburg dialect of Dutch. After a concise overview of both the goal of this paper and the definitions of some of the ke...

Variation in vowel height and diphthongal/monophthongal character of the vowels /re/ and /a/ are studied in the speech of two speakers from central Ohio in order to measure their participation in the sequence of vowel system changes commonly referred to as the Northern Cities Shift (Labov, 1994). The data were gathered from radio shows for which th...

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This volume brings together a number of studies on the early stages of creolization which are entirely based on historical data. The recent (re)discovery of early documents written in creole languages such as Negerhollands, Bajan, and Sranan, allows for a detailed and empirically founded reconstruction of creolization as an historical-linguistic pr...

Proefschrift : Letteren : Nijmegen : 1993.