Dutch-German Contact in and Around Bentheim

Abstract

Up to the middle of the 20th century, for people on both sides of the DutchGerman border, the border was no impediment for understanding each other. The Low Saxon dialects on both sides of the border formed a smooth continuum. Until the Second World War the use of the Dutch and German standard languages was restricted almost completely to school, the church and government circles. Especially since the Second World War, the use of standard languages has increased particularly in everyday communication, while the use of the dialect has increasingly been restricted to the private sphere. Furthermore, the dialects in Eastern Netherlands were becoming more Dutch while the dialects in North West Germany were becoming more German (cf. Auer and Hinskens 1996: 15-18 for the influence of political borders in Europa). On the one hand a number of everyday objects were no longer used, so words denoting them in both the Dutch and the German Low Saxon dialects disappeared. On the other hand, when new objects are introduced, the name is often borrowed from the standard language. Existing words were also replaced by words which are the same or similar to ones in the standard languages. The result is that the significance of the political border as dialect border is increasing (Kremer 1984, 1990, Niebaum 1990). The present paper examines the contemporary situation in order to find out whether the border continues to drive the dialects apart and to examine the effect of the standard languages. Remarkably, the effects are noticeable over a period of two to three generations.