AMERICAN LINGUIST describes interesting aspects about the Dutch language!

hi everyone i'm ava and i'm an american living in the netherlands and today i wanted to talk to you about some interesting aspects about the dutch language now some of you may have heard me mention this in previous videos of mine and most of you have likely not seen all of my videos and therefore don't know this just kidding so some of you may have heard me mention this in previous videos but i am a linguist by training what that means is i have a phd in linguistics you could also be a different type of linguist so you could be the kind of linguist that speaks a lot of languages and translates different type i am the very nerdy type and arguably the more useless type where my phd was and how humans acquire language but the kind of training you get as a linguist is one that is very broad so basically you're just very attuned to the different structures of language now believe you me in the last few years that i've been learning dutch and i am still very much learning dutch by the way i have been really attentive to the various aspects of the dutch language as linguists do we are extremely annoying and it is very difficult to turn that linguist knob off even though no one asks you to turn it on but it's always there and you're always paying attention but that said it's actually quite interesting to look at a language from that perspective because you kind of see it differently than as opposed to just at the surface and i wanted to share some of those insights with you that i have noticed as a linguist and i should put this very big disclaimer here that the things i'm going to talk about are actually quite basic and broad so they have not been noted by me but by other linguists and i inevitably have come across them in my linguistic training so this is not ava telling you about the facts this is eva telling you about what other people have noticed and of course adding my own interpretation and observation to it so as we like to say that thank you for all the linguists for doing the work and all errors are my own now the first thing i wanted to mention in terms of interesting things about the dutch language is a particular dutch sound no not the one that you're thinking of well if i'm guessing correctly in most cases you're probably thinking of the sound hey that actually didn't come out so bad it was quite flammy nice and flammy but no it is not that sound this sound is actually quite common across world's languages you'll hear it in different languages different language families for instance a really common word in spanish is watch and i was taught immediately to you know add that phlegm so it also exists in spanish and spanish is not a language that people typically associate with this sound but this segment is not about that sound it is about a vowel and i'm curious to hear if you could guess it that vowel is and i'm probably saying it wrong because it's actually really difficult for an english speaker to quite get it right now this sound is typically orthographically written as a u and an i together linguists would write that sound a little bit differently following the international phonetic alphabet but we will talk about the linguistics of this in just a moment so this sound is typically heard in words like so that's onion or hash house in english or like sweater so it's a really common sound and as a non-native dutch speaker i have so much trouble with it because it is so easy to revert to the ow sound the kind of sound that you make in english when you know someone like pricks you or you get hurt ow not the same dutch people distinguish between ow and to the point where my girlfriend or other people misunderstand me sometimes because i can't quite get the uh correct uh even though i try think it's uh coming close with practice but it's just it feels weird every time i do it i feel like i'm doing something strange with my face and honestly it feels more uncomfortable to me than the which i'm just used to at this point anyway so linguistically speaking this i sound is comprised of two vowels it is known as a diphthong the fact that it is a diphthong is not uncommon basically very many languages have diphthongs of some kind it is also not uncommon to have the separate vowels that are part of this diphthong in other languages it's really about the combination of these two sounds so if you are a native dutch speaker you have this very rare sound in your language isn't that great and if you are learning dutch good luck with that you thought you were gonna have a hard time with all the oh no here is another sound for you now the second thing i wanted to share with you about the dutch language is the dutch sentence structure now i'm not going to be able to cover all of dutch syntax i can't even stop laughing while saying this uh in a two-minute segment in this video because dutch syntax is a very rich topic but i do want to share some things i personally ava finds interesting about dutch and there are also some actually interesting phenomena in there so um let's get to it if you are a non-native speaker of dutch and you are taking a dutch class one of the first things they will tell you is that the verb needs to go in the second place in main clauses they may even leave out the main clause part and tell you about it later but what that means is in english for instance when you might say yesterday i went to the store where the verb went appears in third place superficially in dutch you would say so would be in second place saying is wrong it's very englishy it's completely out and in sentences uh where you don't have yesterday for instance you would just say i went to the store see what i mean verb is always in the second place this phenomenon is known as b2 verb second but that is not where it stops in dutch so in main clauses the verb is in second place but what about the rest of the sentence well in subordinate clauses the verb goes at the end so basically dutch follows overall besides the part that the verb needs to come in the second place it follows a sov order so a subject object verb order the verb goes at the end in english we have a svo order so the verb is in the middle and the object goes at the end that's subject verb object so you can already see that if you are trying to learn dutch as an english speaker you might get tripped up on that and it definitely took me some time to get adjusted because i mean sometimes dutch folks will say a really long sentence and then i'm kind of waiting for the point which you kind of get with the verb sometimes so you're like waiting waiting you're like waiting in anticipation for them to get to the word it's all at the end oh no and then eventually they'll say the verb okay so the whole v2 combined with the sov part that's not that interesting i mean it is interesting but it's not that uncommon or different what is actually interesting about dutch is what happens when the verbs are all clustered together at the end of a phrase or sentence let's take this dutch phrase as an example so the brief in english the letter that i received this phrase can also be said in a different way and that is when you flip the verbs at the end so you can also say the brief and both word orders seem to be accepted by dutch speakers now you may have a preference for one or the other that's great but i learned german before i learned dutch and i was told that in german you would only have one word order there that was possible which would be the the brief ikeb no that was the dutch one the brief so that would be the acceptable one in german the other way would be unacceptable to german speakers but why does dutch allow both and which one should i use this is really interesting and i had no idea that you could just do that but apparently you can and also you could have three verbs at the end and then you get even more combinations so this is kind of interesting so now that we've talked about sentences i want to talk a little bit about words and specifically prefixes in dutch now prefixes are interesting in all languages and they are also interesting in dutch and i wanted to share some of my favorite things about dutch prefixes so in dutch when you have a verb and you put something before the verb the meaning of that verb can change and not always in a way that makes sense or is predictable to illustrate my point i'm going to give you two examples let's take the word holla hallu can mean to take or to get and okay that's a verb when you learn another language you need to learn new vocabulary a okay but the thing that gets tricky about dutch verbs is that you kind of get a lot of related meanings or sometimes unrelated meanings by tagging on prefixes to the verb so hala which is to get or to take has a different meaning when you add off to it so afhala is to take away it's a different meaning but it's one that makes sense right af is like to go away or to complete or something like that and then a fala is to take away this is the point where i think to myself oh my god that's great i love it i get all of these bonus vocabulary words these verbs with different meanings by just adding prefixes to them and once you kind of figure out what a prefix could mean you just get to know what the meaning of the verb is right wrong not always for instance her hala is to repeat now i would not get that from hala being get or take that one does not make sense that one i do not love but you need to learn it and that is actually the interesting part about languages is that sometimes they can be unpredictable overall they have all of these rules that you can follow but they are exceptions to well i would say every rule but never say every rule because they could be exceptions to that rule see what i mean another example that i like is spreca spreca means to speak and then you add two to it so tuspreca is to speak to someone to address someone or to address a crowd okay that also makes sense two is two aha so speak two love it again i'm thinking new words by just adding the prefix to the verb and if you know what the prefix means aha combination perfect oh no because ashbreaker means to agree or to meet up with someone how again i'm not going to get that from speak maybe when i meet up with someone speaking happens but if you follow that kind of logic you could end up with a whole bunch of meanings so no that one aspareka is unpredictable and the meaning is not directly derivable from spreaker and the list goes on and on honestly i gave two examples but you could look this up and when you start thinking about it you could just come up with i would say 50 60 very many verbs because they're also a number of prefixes that can be attached to these verbs and finally the last thing i want to talk to you about today is something that a lot of people worldwide and also a lot of dutch people have opinions about when it comes to the dutch language and that has to do with dialects the topic of dialects and languages is actually quite interesting and complicated because as a linguist you realize that drawing the line between what counts as a language and what counts as a dialect is more difficult than it initially seems so if you think about how do you distinguish between what a language's dialect is you may come up with various definitions like maybe it is a dialect when the two varieties spoken are mutually intelligible in india and pakistan pakistan they speak urdu in india they speak hindi those languages are basically the same with the exception of a few high-level vocabulary items like i understand urdu perfectly because i speak hindi to illustrate the point that the distinction between a language and a dialect is arbitrary there is a famous saying that linguists like to repeat over and over ad nauseum and that is that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy this quote was popularized by max weinreich and i think he got it from someone in the audience in one of his lectures that's what they say but basically this quote is important because it shows that it can kind of be a political decision about what dialect gets to be called a language now that also is related to the situation in the netherlands so for instance in the netherlands there's a province called priestland and in friesland they speak frisian now that is interesting because christian was a dialect but it got the status of an official language so what does that mean it means that in school in friesland the kids are taught freesian and they get money for it so you can already see how this plays into the political situation within a country people commonly like to think of dialects as being varieties of a standard language so maybe in the netherlands if you are dutch you have an idea of what standard dutch sounds like and where people who speak standard dutch come from but what gets to be standard dutch is also quite arbitrary and what can be arbitrary is not just the distinction between the language and dialect but also the distinction between varieties of dialects where do you draw the line do you say that every person speaks a different dialect i know this may sound a bit crazy but it can be very difficult to come up with formal definitions of what should be considered a dialect and how do you distinguish between them now with that said with that disclaimer by some definitions of what a dialect could be so if you're looking at different sentence structures they have been estimates that they are about 250 a little over 250 dialects in the netherlands and if you look at vocabulary or other types of definitions then you may get a high number of over 600 dialects in the netherlands the netherlands is a tiny country so i've already mentioned frisian which is one of the official languages in netherlands but there are other dialects and languages that you hear of when you move to the netherlands so i immediately learned that in limburg they have a variety of dialects and those are the really those are really famous and popular um even if you're coming from outside the netherlands they're some of the ones that you hear of first and of course i heard about the distinction between the amsterdam dialect and the rotterdam dialect but what is really really striking is that the netherlands is so small that you could go let's say i live in utrecht i could go 20 minutes outside of utrecht maybe even by bicycle but no let's say by train or by car i could drive out 20 minutes by ordering a cab because i don't drive but and then i would come across a different dialect and on that note thank you all for watching and if you haven't subscribed yet please consider subscribing because that's a really easy and free way to help me out and support this channel and of course until next time

Channel: Dutch Americano

Views: 28,476

Keywords: speaking Dutch, learning Dutch, Dutch language, American speaking Dutch, American learning Dutch, Dutch language facts, linguist, linguistics, American in the Netherlands, life in the Netherlands, moving to Amsterdam, moving to the Netherlands, living in the Netherlands, Dutch

Id: sXCUb5HmULE

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021