The Sound System of Dutch in a General Phonetic Perspective

0. Introduction Dutch is a language spoken by about 20 million people in The Netherlands and Belgium. This region is not only characterised by a complex dialect situation, but also by the use of two institutionalised varieties of the Standard language: the Southern variety is spoken in Flanders or the northern part of Belgium, while the Northern variety is confined to The Netherlands. Apart from minor lexical and syntactic differences, there are significant phonetic differences between the two varieties as well as substantial regional variability within the two speech communities. Over the years, the phonetic characteristics of Dutch have been studied in considerable detail. Historically, most experimental research has been carried out on the Northern variety, while analyses of the Southern variety have generally been impressionistic and are at present outdated. An aspect that –remarkablyhas never received any attention is the question as to how the sound system of Dutch compares to that of other languages of the world. This will be the subject of this paper, in which the sound system of the Southern Standard variety of Dutch will be discussed against the background of a substantial collection of phoneme inventories of the world’s languages. These results may be of interest to amongst others language typologists, teachers of Dutch as a Foreign Language, and phoneticians/phonologists who are fundamentally concerned with the distinction between language and medium.