Kerkrade dialect phonology

This article covers the phonology of the Kerkrade dialect, a West Ripuarian language variety spoken in parts of the Kerkrade municipality in the Netherlands (including the town of Kerkrade itself) and Herzogenrath in Germany.

Just like Colognian, the Kerkrade dialect is not uniform and there are some geographical differences. This article focuses on the variety spoken in the Dutch town of Kerkrade.

Consonants
In contrast to Limburgish and Standard Dutch, but like other varieties of Ripuarian, the Kerkrade dialect was partially affected by the High German consonant shift. For instance, the former became an affricate  in word-initial and word-final positions, after historical  and  as well as when doubled. Thus, the word for "two" is twee in Standard Dutch, but tswai  in the Kerkrade dialect, almost identical to Standard German zwei.


 * The Kerkrade dialect features final-obstruent devoicing, which means that the underlying are devoiced to  at the end of a word.  is not affected by this as it occurs only in a few words (such as ködzele  'to drool') and only between vowels. This mirrors the situation in Luxembourgish.  also occurs only in the intervocalic posititon. Stem-final  are realized as voiced before the plural markers  and : rub  - rubbe, vroag  'question' - vroage  'questions', wief  - wiever , or in verbal conjugation (iech loog  - ze loge ). The voiced  appears only in these contexts, typically following a short vowel.  has two voiced allophones: a uvular fricative , which appears after back vowels, and a palatal approximant , which occurs after front vowels. They are devoiced to  and  in the word-final position. Phonetically, the voiced variants are the same as  and , which are phonological sonorants (and thus cannot participate in final-obstruent devoicing), whereas the voiceless variants are the same as the allophones of . Thus, the plural form zeëje  'saws' has an underlying :  because it alternates with a voiceless fricative in the stem zeëg  'saw', phonemically . Compare this with the vroag - vroage alternation mentioned before, or with the plural-singular pair löcher  - laoch , with underlying voiceless fricatives:.
 * are bilabial, whereas are labiodental.
 * The voiceless plosives are unaspirated, which is their typical Ripuarian realization.
 * Syllable-final tends to be velarized, especially after . It can also be velarized intervocalically after.
 * are velar, is uvular, whereas  is palatal.
 * After phonological back vowels, are uvular, which is reflected in the way they are transcribed in this article. After front vowels (and consonants, in the case of ) they are realized as palatal . The voiced allophones of  are phonetically indistinguishable from  and . In fact, most instances of the historical  are realized as , also in the word-initial position (where it is analyzed as  in this article), as in jreun  'green' (cf. Standard Dutch groen ). The consonants surrounding the diphthong in vroage  'questions' are indistinguishable from each other: . This is an example of rhotacism and it is a typical Ripuarian feature.

Vowels

 * and appear only in stressed closed syllables and when unstressed.
 * and appear only in stressed syllables.
 * Many words that have the long rounded close-mid vowels and  in the neighboring Limburgish dialects have the short  and  in Kerkrade - compare Limburgish good  with Kerkrade jód, both meaning 'good'.
 * can be considered the umlauted variants of.
 * occurs only in unstressed syllables. It is also inserted in the historical consonant clusters of or  followed by a labial or a velar consonant, as in helpe  and sjterk.
 * is the only centering diphthong that can occur before . The functional load of the contrast in this position is unclear.

Phonetic realization

 * Among the short front unrounded vowels, is close,  is near-close , whereas  is mid . Before , the last two are lowered to  and , respectively. In this article, only the allophony of  is marked in phonetic transcription. This means that phonetically, the rounded counterpart of the short  is , as both are normally near-close, whereas  and  are unpaired. In addition,  is unique among the stressable short vowels in that it can appear in the word-final position outside of function words, which makes it a free vowel like Standard Dutch.
 * The phonetic distance between and  is not very great; the former is near-close  (like Standard Dutch $⟨uu⟩$), whereas the latter is close-mid central  (like Standard Dutch $⟨u⟩$), much as in the Limburgish dialect of Hamont. Phonetically speaking, this makes  nothing more than a stressable counterpart of, although the two are phonologically distinct - just as in Standard Dutch. Word-final instances of  are realized as a fully close vowel.
 * Both and  are phonological back vowels, but only the short  is phonetically back: . The long  is phonetically central  (hereafter represented without the diacritic).
 * Before, all of the long vowels are pronounced even longer than in Standard Dutch. In this position, the long are realized with a slight schwa offglide , which means that they approach the centering diphthongs , though the latter have a shorter first element (in addition to the lower starting point of ). The remaining  and  are just elongated  without diphthongization in this position. The vowels are diphthongized and/or elongated even before intervocalic , as in bedoere . This allophony does not occur before the underlying , which means that it is differentiated from  after  by the length of the preceding vowel (which is shorter before ) and the lack of diphthongization of  before . It is unclear whether those differences are consistently maintained.

Pitch accent
As most other Ripuarian and Limburgish dialects, the Kerkrade dialect features a distinction between the thrusting tone (stoottoon, Schärfung or Stoßton), which has a shortening effect on the syllable (not shown in transcriptions in this article) and the slurring tone (sleeptoon, Schleifton). This distinctive pitch accent appears on long vowels as well as short vowels followed by a sonorant. In this article, the slurring tone is transcribed as a high tone, whereas the thrusting tone is left unmarked. This is nothing more than a convention, as the phonetics of the Kerkrade pitch accent are severely under-researched. There are minimal pairs, for example moer 'wall' - moer  'carrot'.

The pitch accent can be the only difference:
 * Between words differentiated only by gender, as in the minimal pair de val - d'r val
 * Between the plural and singular, as in the minimal pair de peëd - 't peëd.
 * This is sometimes reinforced by other differences, e.g. de knieng - d'r knien . Some words have two possible plural forms, one that is differentiated from the singular form only by tone and a more distinct one; compare de boom  with the umlauted de beum, which are plural forms of d'r boom.
 * Between inflected and uninflected forms of adjectives, compare rónge with rónk.
 * Between the diminutive and the primitive form.