17 g's in het Standaardnederlands?

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of regional variation patterns in the pronunciation of standard Dutch /γ/ as spoken in the Netherlands and Flanders. The subjects are 80 Dutch and 80 Flemish professional speakers of the standard language (Dutch language teachers), stratified for region, gender and age. The speech material used in this paper consists of read carrier sentences, with the fricative in onset position, and in which the participants were maximally focused on standard pronunciation. The analyses are based on auditory transcriptions of voice, place of articulation and scrapiness. Seventeen variants of /γ/ show up in the data, but there is a clear geographical split, not coinciding with the state border between the Netherlands and Flanders: north of the rivers Waal and Maas uvular realizations appear to be the standard, south of them (palato-)velars.