Utregs tot Spakenburgs honored on Mother Language Day: ‘Important to preserve dialects’

Every year on February 21, the International Day of the Mother Language is celebrated by UNESCO. For UNESCO, languages ​​are the tool to keep the cultural heritage alive. In the Netherlands, less and less dialect is spoken.

Dialects can differ greatly per region, so Spakenburgs sounds very different from the Utrecht accent. “These regional differences will decrease in the future,” says linguist Sterre Leufkens of Utrecht University.

But a dialect will never disappear completely: “You can still hear whether someone comes from the south, in the future the specific local dialects will be spoken less and less. More regiolects will then arise”. A regiolect is somewhere between the standard language, for example Dutch, and a dialect.

Research by Statistics Netherlands from 2021 shows that about a quarter of the Dutch speak a language other than Dutch at home. This may be a dialect, a regional language such as Frisian, Limburgish and Low Saxon, or another language such as English, Polish or Turkish.

A dialect can be very important for people: “Everyone knows someone who comes from a certain region, who is very attached to the dialect of that region. People grow up with it, it is what belongs to your childhood and where you comes from. That way it can be very decisive for your identity,” says linguist Sterre Leufkens.

“It is important to preserve dialects,” says linguist Sterre Leufkens, “You do that by continuing to speak it naturally, but also by hearing it a lot in books or podcasts. But the most important thing is to pass it on to your children.”

The difference between a language and a dialect is difficult to determine, linguistically there is no difference, says Leufkens: “Utrechts is made of the same building blocks as Dutch. But a dialect has less recognition. Language is a socio-political term.”