An acoustic description of the vowels of Northern and Southern Standard Dutch

TLDR

The study presents a database of fundamental frequency, formant, and duration measurements for 15 Standard Dutch vowels spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium. The database was compiled from read monosyllabic /sVs/ utterances recorded from 40 talkers (20 female, 20 male) stratified by age, gender, and region, with 20 speakers each from Northern and Southern Standard Dutch. The analysis shows that nine monophthongs are distinguishable by steady‑state formants, while long mid and diphthong vowels require dynamic information, and that Northern and Southern Standard Dutch differ little in steady‑state formants but exhibit larger dynamic differences for long mid vowels and, to a lesser extent, diphthongs.

Abstract

A database is presented of measurements of the fundamental frequency, the frequencies of the first three formants, and the duration of the 15 vowels of Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands (Northern Standard Dutch) and in Belgium (Southern Standard Dutch). The speech material consisted of read monosyllabic utterances in a neutral consonantal context (i.e., /sVs/). Recordings were made for 20 female talkers and 20 male talkers, who were stratified for the factors age, gender, and region. Of the 40 talkers, 20 spoke Northern Standard Dutch and 20 spoke Southern Standard Dutch. The results indicated that the nine monophthongal Dutch vowels /a ɑ ɛ i ɪ ɔ u y ʏ/ can be separated fairly well given their steady-state characteristics, while the long mid vowels /e o ø/ and three diphthongal vowels /ɛɪ ɔu y/ also require information about their dynamic characteristics. The analysis of the formant values indicated that Northern Standard Dutch and Southern Standard Dutch differ little in the formant frequencies at steady-state for the nine monophthongal vowels. Larger differences between these two language varieties were found for the dynamic specifications of the three long mid vowels, and, to a lesser extent, of the three diphthongal vowels.