Effe nog eens zeggen : de weggelaten klanken in het Nederlands – de afgebroken bruggen voor een Tsjech?

Abstract

Czech and Dutch differ among others in terms of reduction processes. Spoken Dutch can sometimes be difficult to understand for a Czech. This is due to the fact that there is a lot of reduction in sounds. On the one hand, the reduction can be at the level of the dropped word ends or omitted vowels in unstressed syllables. This kind of reduction can still be identified in many cases by a speaker of Dutch as a foreign language. In addition, as Ernestus et. al. (2016) calls it, extreme reduction can occur where the words and sentences are reduced. In such cases, this phonological process causes requests in the perception of such utterances by speaker of Dutch as a foreign language. In this article I give a description of the results of a pilot study carried out among Czech students of Dutch at A2+ level that was focused on understanding reduced utterances. Moreover,I formulate an outline for further research.