Hi Wouter,
Can you tell me, do you think Zeelandic is further or the same distance linguistically from Dutch as Limburgish??
Mark
Yes Mark, I can. It is closer to Dutch than Limburgish. That is why I am not sure at all if Zealandic can get a Wikipedia of its own. Limburgic is clearly different from Dutch for its tonal nature and features like umlaut in diminutives and irregular verbs. I already pointed out the main differences at this list earlier. The differences between Dutch proper and Zeelandic are comparable with those between English and Scots. An advantage is that Zeelandic is far more coherent than Limburgic: the differences between the dialects are minor. While some Zeelandic sentences will be so similar to their Dutch equivalents that it would seem madness to request a separate Wikipedia, spoken Zeelandic remains very problematic to be understood by those who speak Dutch as their native language. Imagine Western Europe having remained in earlier stages of development, and Africa being the leading area in modern politics and science. Imagine an African linguist coming in through the polders, trying to record the languages of the Lowlands that need yet to be investigated. He would probably conclude that Zeelandic and Hollandic (Dutch) are two closely related but separate languages, connected by a dialect continuum, that Limburgic is slightly more distant but also connected to both of them with a dialect continuum (being is the Brabantic dialect area), and that Frisian is also somewhat more distant, but unlike Limburgish hardly connected with Hollandic by a dialect continuum. Respecting to the Low Saxon dialects in the Northeast part of the country, *we* consider it a seperate language on for historical reasons, but our African linguist would draw a similar conclusion for Netherlands Low Saxon as for Zeelandic. Interestingly, Ethnologue names a lot of Low Saxon dialects in the Netherlands as separate language: Veenkolonial, Twentish, Stellingwervish, Achterhoeks... It is ridiculous, I think, to consider them all seperate languages. But they made a big mistake /not/ to mention Zeelandic - I think they just forgot, considering the otherwise low threshold for language variants to be called languages.
As I said before: I myself am not absolutely convinced Zeelandic (and Town Frisian) should get a project of its (their) own. But I would like to know if it could get your support, as I have the impression the defintion for languages/ dialects in the Netherlands is rather strict. If most of you can't approve this, I could request a Wikicity, of course, but for cases like these (imo on the border of what it a language and what isn't) I found a discussion desirable.
Wouter
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