Het einde van het Poldernederlands?*

Abstract

The end of Polder Dutch? De perception of /εi/ and /ai/ in Standard Dutch in the Netherlands.While most early research on so-called Poldernederlands ‘Polder Dutch’ (Van Bezooijen 1999; Van Bezooijen & Van den Berg 2001) finds differences in perceptions between this supposedly substandard variety and Standard Dutch, this paper aims to demonstrate that present-day language users do not distinguish between the two varieties (anymore). Two combined matched-guise experiments show that non-linguists are unable to name the variety and that they do not score them differently on a large number of evaluative scales. The results suggest the end of Polder Dutch as a perceptually separate variety, and the absorption of its most marked feature, viz. the lowering of /εi/ to /ai/ into Standard Dutch.