Vowel Reduction in Spontaneous Spoken Dutch

This paper reports on a study of vowel reduction in contemporary Standard Dutch. The focus is on the first, unstressed syllable of four bisyllabic Dutch words: moment, manier, probeer(t) and docent. Vowel reduction is studied in a corpus of spontaneously spoken Standard Dutch, produced by 80 Flemish and 80 Dutch teachers of Dutch. Three labelers independently evaluated and scored the stimuli on a seven point scale with ‘long vowel’ and ‘complete deletion’ as its extreme values. Three main types of vowel reduction were distinguished: reduction to schwa (e.g. moment > m> @ment), vowel shortening (e.g. m>o@ment > m> @ment) and complete reduction (e.g. moment > ‘ment). Short vowels appeared to be most frequent, especially in Flanders. Reduction to schwa and complete reduction only occurred in the Netherlands. The Dutch material also supports the assumption that in highfrequency words vowels are more easily reduced than in words with a lower frequency.