These poor West-Flemish people speak in such a dialect that it can't be understood by a large range of people in Flanders, hence the fact that they have to be subtitled quite automatically. But one man dares to stand up against this injustice:
I found a little sketch with our (still!) Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt voiced over in West-Flemish in order to create some silly story:
I admit I didn't understand 100% of it, but it's quite funny to listen to this regional variety of Dutch.
The New Yorker cartoons
6 years ago
5 comments:
Ok, people from West Flanders do speak in a peculiar way, but then again so do people from, say, Oostende or even Maastricht. And coming from Aubel, you should know about funny accents! We all have our little idosyncrasies, don't we?
You actually meant "idiosyncrasies". Thanks for this new word — that you won't find in the OALD, but here's what the Wikipedia entry reads:
Structural or behavioral characteristic peculiar to an individual or group.
Yeah, I have a funny accent, but I don't use dialect when I talk — except for a limited number of expressions (such as the typical "oufti" or the "nin" instead of "pas"), but that's all.
Even if many people have an accent in my region, we can be easily understood in Namur. Except, again, for certain words whose meaning is different, e.g. the famous "chique" vs. "bonbon". But this has nothing to do with accent.
Forgive me for splitting hairs, but Oostende is of course in West Flanders ;) That being said, they do speak a recognizably different variety of West Flemish compared to mine -- perhaps most strikingly the 'ee' sound as in 'de zee' (or, more idiomatically, the diminutive form ' 't zeetje') is very different (in the seaside dialects around Oostende it sounds a bit like the RP diphthong in 'scared').
oh, and here's another hair to split: idiosyncrasy is in the OALD; it's defined there as "a person’s particular way of behaving, thinking, etc., especially when it is unusual; an unusual feature"
[@ Lieven Vandelanotte]
Yes, you're right: it is in the OALD, but when I first looked it up, I searched for "idosyncrasy", as written by Mr Romero in the first comment. As a result I found no entry for that.
Then I looked it up on Wikipedia, and I realized that Mr Romero meant in fact "idiosyncrasies". And I didn't check if that word was in the OALD or not…
My mistake.
I am a perfect example of the lexeme following "idiosyncrasy"—namely "idiot"!!!!
PS. Thanks for the precisions about West-Flemish varieties!
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