Puneet Varma (Editor)

Hamont dialect

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Native to
  
Belgium

Glottolog
  
None

Region
  
Hamont-Achel


Language family
  
Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Low Franconian Meuse-Rhenish Limburgish West Limburgish Dommellands Hamont dialect

Hamont dialect or Hamont Limburgish is the city dialect and variant of Limburgish spoken in the Belgian city of Hamont (a part of Hamont-Achel) alongside the Dutch language (with which it is not mutually intelligible).

Contents

Consonants

  • 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 [də].
  • Word-final voiceless consonants are voiced in intervocalic position.

    • Vowels

  • Verhoeven (2007) does not consider /ɪ/–/eː/ to be a short–long pair. They have nevertheless been placed in the table in that manner to save space. The same applies to the phonetically mid vowel /ə/, which has been placed in the open-mid column.
  • Phonetically, /y/ is near-close near-front [ʏ], /ɪ/ is close-mid front [e], /ʏ/ is close-mid central [ɵ], /æ, æː/ are open front [a, aː], whereas /aː/ is open central [äː].
  • Among the central vowels, /ʏ/ is rounded, whereas /ə, aː/ are unrounded.
  • /ə/ occurs only in unstressed syllables.
  • Among the back vowels, /u, uː, oː, ɔ, ɔː/ are rounded, whereas /ɑ, ɑː/ are unrounded.

    • Prosody

    Like most other Limburgish dialects, but unlike some other dialects in this area, the prosody of the Hamont 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.

    References

    Hamont dialect Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA