Hamont dialect phonology

This article is about the phonology of the dialect of Limburgish.

Consonants

 * are bilabial, whereas are labiodental.
 * are unaspirated.
 * The glottal stop occurs in strong onsets of word-initial vowels.
 * Word-initially, in the  cluster can be realized as.
 * do not occur as frequently as in many other dialects. considers them to have a marginal status.
 * are velar, whereas is palatal.  may be pre-velar before front vowels.
 * is a uvular trill. Word-finally it is devoiced to either a fricative or a trill fricative.
 * Other allophones include, , and . They appear in contexts similar to Belgian Standard Dutch.
 * Voiceless consonants are regressively assimilated. An example of this is the past tense of regular verbs, where voiceless stops and fricatives are voiced before the past tense morpheme.
 * Word-final voiceless consonants are voiced in intervocalic position.

Vowels
The Hamont-Achel dialect contains 22 monophthong and 13 diphthong phonemes. The amount of monophthongs is higher than that of consonants.

Monophthongs


In addition to these, there is also the schwa, which occurs only in unstressed syllables.

does not consider -  to be a short-long pair. They have been placed in the table in a manner which saves space.

On average, long vowels are 95 ms longer than short vowels. This is very similar to Belgian Standard Dutch, in which the difference is 105 ms.

All short vowels except are somewhat more open and central than their long counterparts. Short and  are somewhat closer and more front than their long counterparts. The differences however are very small, which seems to indicate that this dialect distinguishes vowel pair only by duration. The only exception to this is, which is substantially more open and more central than the long version. Note that none of these differences are indicated on the monophthong chart to the right.


 * Notes about close vowels:
 * are close front unrounded.
 * are close near-front rounded.
 * are close back rounded.
 * Notes about close-mid vowels:
 * is somewhat lowered close-mid near-front unrounded.
 * is close-mid front unrounded.
 * is close-mid near-front rounded.
 * is somewhat lowered close-mid central rounded.
 * is close-mid back rounded.
 * Notes about open-mid vowels:
 * are open-mid front unrounded.
 * are open-mid near-front rounded.
 * are open-mid back rounded.
 * Notes about open vowels:
 * are open front unrounded.
 * is open central unrounded.
 * are open back unrounded.


 * Notes
 * is not considered a phoneme by.

Monophthong-glide combinations
All monophthong-glide combinations are restricted to the syllable coda. This is not the case in the neighbouring dialect of Weert, where the short monophthong-glide combinations may be followed by a tautosyllabic consonant.

Diphthongs
Dialect of Hamont-Achel contrasts long and short closing diphthongs. The long ones are on average 70 ms longer than their short equivalents. Centering diphthongs are all long.


 * are phonetically . They begin open-mid slightly retracted front unrounded, end fronted near-close near-front unrounded.
 * are phonetically . They begin open-mid near-front rounded, end somewhat lowered close near-front rounded.
 * are phonetically . They begin open-mid near-back rounded, end slightly raised near-close near-back rounded.
 * are phonetically . They begin somewhat raised near-open central unrounded, end somewhat lowered near-close near-back rounded.


 * is phonetically . It begins near-close front unrounded, ends close-mid central unrounded.
 * is phonetically . It begins near-close near-front rounded, ends central, slightly above close-mid unrounded.
 * is phonetically . It begins near-close near-back rounded, ends central, slightly above close-mid unrounded.
 * is phonetically . It begins close-mid near-back rounded, ends close-mid central unrounded.
 * is phonetically . It begins mid near-back rounded, ends slightly below close-mid central unrounded.

Prosody
Like most other Limburgish dialects, but unlike some other dialects in this area, the prosody of the Hamont-Achel dialect has a lexical tone distinction, which is traditionally referred to as sleeptoon ('dragging tone') or Accent 1 and stoottoon ('push tone') or Accent 2. They are transcribed as superscript 1 and superscript 2, respectively. This distinction can signal either lexical differences or grammatical distinctions, such as those between the singular and the plural forms of some nouns.

In stressed syllables, there is no distinction between Accent 1 and no-Accent. All accented syllables have to have either Accent 1 or Accent 2.

In final position, Accent 1 is realised as a steady fall through the rhyme. Accent 2 is realised as a fall-rise contour; the first half of the rhyme is falling, whereas the rest is rising.

In non-final position, Accent 1's F0 stays high in the first 45% of the rhyme and then falls rapidly towards the end of the rhyme. When the focus of the sentence is on a word with Accent 2, it is realized as a very shallow fall-rise combination. When the sentence is not focused on the word with Accent 2, its F0 stays high in the initial twenty percent of the rhyme, then falls towards the end of the rhyme.

Vowels with Accent 1 are generally shorter than those with Accent 2.

Sample
The sample text is a reading of The North Wind and the Sun, read by a 75-year-old male middle-class speaker.

Orthographic version (Standard Belgian Dutch)
De noordenwind en de zon waren ruzie aan het maken over wie het sterkste was toen er een man voorbij kwam met een warme jas aan. Ze spraken af om te proberen de man zijn jas te laten uittrekken. De noordenwind blies zo hard hij kon, maar hoe harder hij blies hoe warmer de reiziger zich induffelde. Uiteindelijk gaf hij het op. Dan begon de zon hard te schijnen en de man deed zijn jas uit. De noordenwind moest toegeven dat de zon het sterkste was.