Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2004 7:40 PM
In the Dutch tradition, somebody who becomes a professor has to deliver an inaugural address. Frans Hinskens, my colleague at the Meertens Instituut, became a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam. I attended his inaugural address last Friday. The text (in Dutch) is
on the Meertens website.
Hinskens discusses three 'new' varieties of Dutch: (1) regiolects (i.e. varieties in which local dialects in an area have merged), (2) regional varieties (i.e. varieties in which local dialects have been influenced by the standard language), (3) ethnolects (varieties of Dutch spoken by the children of immigrants). He mentions that these varieties are interesting among other things because we can learn from them to what extent grammatical systems can vary. But what is of course even more interesting is that we can see here how language change acts -- live in action, as it were.