Location: Zandvliet, Antwerp, Belgium, and Amsterdam, Netherlands

Project participation: Antwerp Brabantish

y name is Diederik, 21 years old and originally from the region around Antwerp, raised in Zandvliet, and educated in Merksem since I was twelve. From the moment I started learning Latin in school I got fascinated by languages and their structures, and reading Tolkien’s work only made that interest grow bigger. I thus exchanged my high school “Mathematics-Science” classes for Scandinavian studies (major Norwegian) at the University of Amsterdam, where I’m currently still living. My interest mainly concerns both the historical development and the many regional/sociological varieties of the Germanic languages, and mostly the similarities and common features (or their dissimilarity and differences!).

As a child I was raised with so called Verkavelingsvlaams or Common Flemish, like most of my friends of my generation. This Verkavelingsvlaams is a mixture of Standard Dutch and the remnants of the local dialects once (until maybe 30 years ago) spoken by nearly everyone in the Southern Netherlands (“Flanders”). As time went on and I grew older and wiser, I realised how sad it was that the original dialects gradually disappeared, and how more and more standardised even the Common Flemish became within the same group of people. I started collecting as much information as I could, teaching myself the city dialect as well as possible. I’m not close to being a native speaker by any means, but still becoming more and more confident in talking and writing Aentwaerps.

We linguists are lucky to live in the time of the Internet, so one doesn’t need to even meet people anymore who actually speak a dialect to teach oneself a lot about it. It’s great to meet this many people here on Lowlands-L, to see that more people care about their and other’s native tongues, which are being absorbed more and more into the national standard languages.

Diederik
2005