Young people exaggerate Brabantish, but keep the dialect alive

Young people from Brabant, a southern part of the Netherlands, exaggerate their pronunciation of the dialect, to fit in or for a light-hearted note in the workplace. Older people from Brabant are horrified by it, but the younger generation keeps Brabant alive, Kristel Doreleijers observes in her PhD research.

They are often details, such as a slight difference in a masculine or feminine ending of a word. In Brabantish you say ‘unne man’ (a man) and ‘unnen hond’ (a dog), but ‘un vrouwke’ (a woman) and ‘un koe’ (a cow). The -e(n) that is added at the end of masculine words is a remnant of a Brabant language that still distinguished between masculine and feminine words, as is common in German and French.

But whoever says ‘unne vrouwke’ sins against the rule. Young people who don’t speak the dialect at home exaggerate language rules because it ‘sounds’ Brabantish. For people who speak Brabantish at home, all hairs stand on end.

Nevertheless, Kristel Doreleijers is mild about this grammatical ‘sin’: ‘Young people want to sound Brabantish, so they are going to use it anyway. Then it becomes a ‘hyper dialect’, it sounds dialect-like, but exaggerated. Young people use the dialect in their own way, and that’s part of a living language.’

Juggling with language

Language variation can only be properly understood within a social context, Doreleijers argues in her dissertation Styling the Local: Hyperdialectisms and the Enregisterment of the Gender Suffix in the ‘New’ Dialect of North Brabant.

Young people in Brabant effortlessly switch from standard language to Brabantish, for example to create an informal atmosphere among themselves, or to express conviviality. Because Brabantish quickly ‘sounds’ cozy and ‘Burgundian’.

This flexibility in the use of language is characteristic of contemporary generations. Whereas older speakers are more likely to speak one language in different social situations, today’s young people know how to effortlessly vary between various language variants. ‘That has to do with mobility,’ says Doreleijers.

‘In the past, young people often stayed in their village and went to school or work there. But in the mid-twentieth century, that slowly changed. Young people increasingly went to school outside their own hometowns, and they also came into contact with other languages. And those languages have started to mix. You distance yourself more from your own local language, in order to be able to communicate with others.’

Wide palette

Younger speakers who did not grow up with Brabantish at home still have a wide range of language variations, thanks to the schoolyard and social media, with the Brabant dialect adding extra color. For example, you can occasionally use dialect in formal situations, for example in the classroom or in the workplace: it creates a light-hearted note, an atmosphere of ‘one of us’.

They take it for granted that young people ‘sin’ against the original rules. Or they do it on purpose to reflect on an old-fashioned or funny situation. This creates a hyperdialect that is full of references to the social character of language. The youngsters play a language game within their own social group.

‘A living language that is in motion provides a wealth of information’

There is little point in disapproving of this form of dialect use, because language is in a state of flux, Doreleijers thinks. Unlike regional languages such as Limburgish and Frisian, the use of Brabantish is declining rapidly. Brabantish desperately needs this influx of young speakers in order to survive.

Local heroes

In addition, the Brabant dialect also says something about the uniqueness of Brabant. And that local aspect is becoming increasingly important in a world that is globalizing at a rapid pace, with more and more cultural characteristics becoming the same and regional distinctions fading or even disappearing altogether.

‘Language is a very important factor for people to feel at home, to belong to something, to experience that rootedness within the region as well,’ Doreleijers noticed in her research. ‘Just when the world is getting bigger, people need to return to their own roots.’

Not serious

In the past, Brabantish was often associated with ‘peasant’, ‘backward’ or ‘antisocial’ on the one hand or ‘jovial’ and ‘Burgundian’ on the other, but nowadays the dialect often has a ‘funny’ connotation.

This is reinforced by the performance of comedians such as Hans Teeuwen, Theo Maassen and Steven Brunswijk and a series of advertisements in which people from Brabant figure in funny situations. Films and series such as New Kids, Undercover and Ferry have also contributed significantly to that image.

Sometimes it seems as if people from Brabant don’t take their own dialect seriously. This is in stark contrast to the way in which Frisians and Limburgers deal with their language. They raise their children from an early age with their own language, in a dedicated way.

Language close to the people

Brabantish, on the other hand, is hardly passed on as a first language by parents to their children, and Brabantish is also not heard in schools and in formal situations. Nevertheless, it is still worthwhile to preserve Brabantish and to study it in a serious way, also at the university, Doreleijers believes.

That is why Doreleijers has also included a Brabant public summary in her English-language dissertation: ‘I did that to show that you can also talk about serious scientific topics in Brabants. And I want to show the people who participated in my research what came out of the research. I prefer to do that in a language that is close to them.’

The Brabant dialect is struggling, but it is not standing still. ‘And a living language that is in motion provides a wealth of information,’ says Doreleijers. ‘In this way, linguists can learn a lot about how language develops, and which grammatical and social influences play a role in language variation.’ So, it’s also a kind of recognition for the dialect speakers that their language matters and is worth studying.

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