Orsmaal-Gussenhoven dialect phonology

This article covers the phonology of the Orsmaal-Gussenhoven dialect, a variety of Getelands (a transitional dialect between South Brabantian and West Limburgish) spoken in Orsmaal-Gussenhoven, a village in the Linter municipality.

Obstruents

 * The fortis–lenis distinction in the case of plosives manifests itself purely through voicing - are voiceless, whereas  and  are voiced. In the case of the fricatives, the same is true of the  pair, though  is a non-native phoneme that occurs only in the word-initial position. It can be affricated to, but the  contrast is not stable and the two phonemes undergo a variable merger to . In the case of the native fortis–lenis pairs of fricatives, the contrast between  on the one hand and  on the other manifests itself mainly through the less energetic articulation of the latter, particularly in the case of the velar , which is mostly voiceless. In the case of , they can be partially voiced in the word-initial position, with the second part being voiceless. In the intervocalic position, they are completely voiceless.
 * are bilabial, whereas are labiodental.
 * are velar.
 * The exact place of articulation of varies:
 * Velar before and after back vowels and, in the case of, also when it is preceded by a back vowel in an intervocalic position between stressed and unstressed syllable.
 * Palatal before and after front vowels and, in the case of, also after.
 * Word-initial is restricted to the sequence.
 * may be dropped by some speakers.
 * may be affricated to . does not specify the environment(s) in which the affrication of  and  takes place, but it may occur word-initially, as in the case of the non-native . In the case of stops, it occurs in pre-pausal position, where voiced fricatives are banned.

Sonorants

 * is bilabial and so is, which is a bilabial approximant without velarization: . In this article, the latter is written with ⟨w⟩, following the recommendations of Carlos Gussenhoven regarding transcribing the corresponding Standard Dutch phone.
 * are alveolar.
 * before is pronounced as follows:
 * , if belongs to another morpheme (alveolo-palatal  before allomorphemic );
 * , if belongs to the same morpheme.
 * Word-final appears only in loanwords from French.
 * tends to be velarized, especially postvocalically.
 * has a few possible realizations:
 * Apical trill or an apical fricative  before a stressed vowel in word-initial syllables.
 * Intervocalically and in the onset after a consonant, it may be a tap.
 * Word-final is highly variable; the most frequent variants are an apical fricative trill, an apical fricative  and an apical non-sibilant affricate . The last two variants tend to be voiceless  in pre-pausal position.
 * The sequence can be vocalized to  or.
 * is velar, whereas is palatal.
 * appear only word-initially and intervocalically.

Final devoicing and assimilation
Just like Standard Dutch, Orsmaal-Gussenhoven dialect devoices all obstruents at the ends of words.

Morpheme-final may be voiced if a voiced plosive or a vowel follows.

Vowels
The vowel system of the Orsmaal-Gussenhoven dialect is considerably richer than that of Standard Dutch. It features a phonemic distinction between close and open variants of the vowels corresponding to SD and  (with the close variants being  and  and the open ones  and ), long open-mid vowels (which are only marginal in SD) as well as a number of diphthongs that do not exist in the standard language.


 * Peters gives six more diphthongs, which are . He gives no evidence for their phonemic status as phonemes separate from and no information on their distribution, apart from the fact that both  and  can appear in the word-final position, as in to  'shut' (adv.), jäönae  'June', deno  'afterwards' and vörbae  'past' (adv.). Only three words in his paper (outside of the list of example words for vowels) contain any of those diphthongs: togaeve  'to admit' (which itself contains the monophthong ) as well as the aforementioned to  and jäönae . Brabantian dialects are known for both diphthongizing  (much as in Northern Standard Dutch) and especially monophthongizing . Many of the words in Peters' paper which contain the long open-mid monophthongs have Standard Dutch cognates with, such as the aforementioned vörbae (SD: voorbij ), äöl  'owl' (SD: uil ) or rao  'raw' (SD: rauw ). Not only that,  and  in Standard Dutch cognates are actually of Brabantian origin (see the article Brabantse expansie on Dutch Wikipedia), with the monophthongal  being a Brabantian innovation that appeared later. Because of that, the distinction between the closing diphthongs and the monophthongs is ignored elsewhere in the article, with ⟨eː, øː, oː, ɛː, œː, ɒː⟩ being used as cover symbols for both.
 * There are two additional short tense vowels and, which appear only in a few French loanwords. They are tenser (higher and perhaps also more rounded) than the native  and  (which is much more open than the canonical value of the IPA symbol ⟨ʊ⟩ - see below). Their status as phonemes separate from the long tense  and  is unclear; Peters treats them as marginal phonemes.
 * occurs only before alveolar consonants.
 * All long front unrounded vowels contrast with centering diphthongs, so that tien 'ten', beer  'beer' and maet  'May' contrast with tieën  'toe', beër  'bear' and maeët  'march'. The fact that this contrast occurs even before  is remarkable from the Standard Dutch viewpoint, where only centering diphthongs can occur in that environment. In the Ripuarian dialect of Kerkrade (spoken further east on the Germany–Netherlands border), the otherwise phonemic distinction between  and  on the one hand and  and  on the other is completely neutralized before  in favor of the former, mirroring the lack of phonemic contrast in Standard Dutch.
 * Stressed short vowels cannot occur in open syllables. Exceptions to this rule are high-frequency words like wa 'what' and loanwords from French.

Phonetic realization

 * Most of the long vowels are close to the canonical values of the corresponding IPA symbols. The open is phonetically central, whereas the monophthongal allophone of  is near-open . The short open vowels have the same quality, and the open  are phonological back vowels despite the symbolization.
 * Among the long rounded vowels, before  within the same syllable vary between monophthongs  and centering diphthongs, which often are disyllabic  (with the first portion realized as a closing diphthong). At least in the case of  and , the tongue movement may be so slight that they are sometimes better described as lip-diphthongs . In the same environment,  can be disyllabic . For the sake of simplicity, those allophones are transcribed  in phonetic transcription.
 * has the same kind of allophonic range before plosives as, varying between.
 * The short mid front vowels are rather closer than their phonemic long counterparts and considerably higher than the short back vowels of the same phonemic height, so that approach  in articulation:.
 * Among the short back vowels, approaches  in articulation:, whereas  is both more open and more central than : , being of the same height as the phonemically open-mid . The remaining  is more open than , as stated above. Thus, the phonetic back counterpart of  is , whereas the phonetic back counterpart of  is . The phonetically near-open  has no real phonetic front counterpart, as the open  is phonetically central.
 * Among the diphthongal allophones of, the ending points of and  are closer than the ending points of any other fronting diphthong, being more like . This reinforces the phonetic difference between them and . In addition,  differs from (Northern) Standard Dutch  in that it has an unrounded, central onset, rather than a rounded, centralized back one. In Belgian Standard Dutch, the corresponding vowel is monophthongal.
 * The second elements of and the  allophones of  are more open than the monophthongs  and ; in addition, the first element of  is open central:.
 * The first element of the allophone of  is considerably more close and central than the  monophthong, being open-mid central ; in addition, its second element is higher than, being closer to the canonical IPA value of the symbol ⟨ʊ⟩:.
 * The second elements of and the  allophone of  are also higher than ; in addition, the first element of  is near-open central, identical to that of :.
 * The quality of the remaining diphthongs is close to the canonical values of the IPA symbols used to transcribe them.

Differences in transcription of the back vowels
In this article, the vowels in words oech 'you', mót 'moth' and boat 'beard' differ from the way they are transcribed by, who uses a narrower transcription. The differences are listed below:

The way those vowels are transcribed in this article reflects how they are typically transcribed in IPA transcriptions of Dutch dialects, especially Limburgish. For instance, the symbol ⟨ɔ⟩ is most typically used for the open short O in any given dialect (the one in mot, which is transcribed with ⟨ɒ⟩ in this article:, following Peters), not the close short O in mót whenever the two are contrastive. Peters uses ⟨ʊ⟩ for the short OE in oech, but this is transcribed with ⟨u⟩ in this article due to the fact that the symbol ⟨ʊ⟩ is commonly used for the close short O in Dutch dialectology, which is how that vowel is written in this article.

The diphthong in mous, transcribed with ⟨ɞʊ⟩ by Peters, has also been retranscribed with a more common symbol ⟨ɔʊ⟩, though it is treated as a mere allophone of in this article.

Prosody
Stress location is largely the same as in Belgian Standard Dutch. In loanwords from French, the original word-final stress is often preserved, as in kedaw 'cadeau'.

Sample
The sample text is a reading of the first sentence of The North Wind and the Sun. The orthographic version is written in Standard Dutch.

Orthographic version (Eye dialect)
De nörderwind en de zón hadden 'n diskeuse evve de vroog wie van hun twie de sterrekste was, tun du zjuust emmand vörbae kóm be 'nen dikke, warreme jas aan.

Orthographic version (Standard Dutch)
De noordenwind en de zon hadden een discussie over de vraag wie van hun tweeën de sterkste was, toen er juist iemand voorbij kwam met een dikke, warme jas aan.