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Hamont dialect phonology


This article is about the phonology of the Hamont dialect of Limburgish.

The Hamont dialect contains 22 monophthong and 13 diphthong phonemes. The amount of monophthongs is higher than that of consonants.

Verhoeven (2007) does not consider /ɪ–eː/ to be a short–long pair. They have nevertheless been placed in the table in that manner to save space. The same applies to the phonetically mid vowel /ə/, which has been placed in the open-mid column.

On average, long vowels are 95 ms longer than short vowels. This is very similar to Belgian Standard Dutch, in which the difference is 105 ms.

All short vowels except /æ, ɑ/ are somewhat more open and central than their long counterparts. Short /æ/ and /ɑ/ are somewhat closer and more front than their long counterparts. The differences however are very small, which seems to indicate that this dialect distinguishes vowel pair only by duration. The only exception to this is /y/, which is substantially more open and more central than the long version. Note that none of these differences are indicated on the monophthong chart to the right.

All monophthong-glide combinations are restricted to the syllable coda. This is not the case in the neighbouring dialect of Weert, where the short monophthong-glide combinations may be followed by a tautosyllabic consonant.

Dialect of Hamont contrasts long and short closing diphthongs. The long ones are on average 70 ms longer than their short equivalents. Centering diphthongs are all long.

Like most other Limburgish dialects, but unlike some other dialects in this area, the prosody of the Hamont dialect has a lexical tone distinction, which is traditionally referred to as sleeptoon ('dragging tone') or Accent 1 and stoottoon ('push tone') or Accent 2. They are transcribed as superscript 1 and superscript 2, respectively. This distinction can signal either lexical differences or grammatical distinctions, such as those between the singular and the plural forms of some nouns.

The distinction between Accent 1 and Accent 2 is phonemic only in stressed syllables.


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