A corpus of regional Dutch speech

Abstract

We present in this paper a phonetically transcribed corpus of regional Dutch speech from the Netherlands and Belgian Flanders and some example analyses using it. The corpus consists not only of 200 common words, but also of 200 nonsense words as these were pronounced by radio announcers from regional radio stations. The announcers regularly speak on radio programs with an explicitly regional remit, and they agreed to our recording them using regional speech but also using the standard language (standard Netherlandic Dutch in the Netherlands and standard Belgian Dutch in Flanders), which they also spoke professionally. The corpus is publicly available for analyses concerning, e.g., the relative differences between Dutch and Belgian regional speech, the relative similarity of regional speech to standard speech in the two countries, and the probity of models such as Auer's & Hinskens' (1996) "cone model", within which regional speech should be found. Nerbonne, Van Ommen, Wieling & Gooskens (to appear) have indeed used the corpus material to test whether regional speech adheres to the predictions of the cone model.