It is not uncommon for the naive native speaker of English to confuse German and Dutch. One reason for this lies in the English names for the languages, but another reason is that Dutch and German sound similar to the anglophone ear. Many, perhaps even most, university students of Dutch in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the anglophone world come to Dutch with a good knowledge of German and again, often draw parallels between their mother tongue, and Dutch and German. Of course, professional linguists know that English and German are neighbors of Dutch and members of the same Germanic language family. However, comments by naive native speakers serve to highlight questions about the typological contrasts between these three languages.

This paper examines the socio-historical context in which Dutch arose as a result of contact between Frankish and Ingvæonic speakers in the seventh and eighth centuries. I first consider some persistent pitfalls in socio-historical linguistics with regard to better-known instances of language contact in medieval Europe. I review the reflexes of umlaut in Dutch and propose a solution for this long-standing problem in terms of language contact. Finally, the linguistic analysis is placed in a social and historical context, with special attention to the role of slavery in creating the context for the linguistic developments that took place.*

The dialect geography and etymology of Dutch, Frisian, and German trVm(e) ‘crossbeam’ suggest that western Dutch triem continues West Germanic +‑ǣ-, which underwent vowel raising to /i./ as in Frisian. Thus, Dutch traam beside triem belongs to an established group of Standard Dutch words showing /a./ next to /i./ from West Germanic +‑ǣ-, such as schraal vs. schriel. It is argued that the survival of words in /i./ in the coastal dialects of Dutch fits into recent theories that Standard Dutch is the result of language contact between medieval Frisian and Franconian.*

We investigated strong-verb paradigm leveling in German, Dutch, English, and Swedish, and found significant differences in ablaut leveling and class change towards the weak conjugation. Swedish favors ablaut patterns retaining a difference between the preterite and the past participle, while German, Dutch, and English favor a common vowel for both forms. In change from the strong to the weak conjugation in Swedish, the preterite is more resistant than the past participle, while in the other languages it is the reverse. We provide a unified explanation for these facts based on differences in category frequency due to the prominence or lack of an aspectual distinction between preterite and perfect.*

This article examines a remarkable case of analogy in the verbal systems of German and Dutch which to date has hardly received any attention. In both languages, the ablaut pattern that originally stems from the second Germanic ablaut class (“oPRETERITE = oPAST PARTICIPLE”) spread to other strong verbs by analogy, as in German heben–hob–gehoben or Dutch binden–bond–gebonden. It is argued that the low token frequency of these verbs triggered this analogy. As in both cases a new type of ablaut class arises through the convergence of several strong verbs, I refer to it as the eighth ablaut class.*

English marks the distinction between adjectives and adverbs with an adverbial suffix, whereas Dutch and German allow adjectives to be used adverbially without extra morphology. This may give rise to the idea that English, like Latin, is more specific in its classification of various types of modifiers. We propose an alternative analysis: Dutch and German draw a different dividing line, between attributive modifiers (NP-level) on the one hand, and predicative and adverbial modifiers (clause-level) on the other. To this end, they use adjectival inflection instead of derivational morphology. We describe how the adverbial systems in these three West-Germanic languages have developed and try to explain the changes that have occurred.

Although Dutch, English, and German all have a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless plosives, they differ in the way these stops are realized. While English and German contrast voiceless aspirated with phonetically voiceless stops, Dutch has a contrast between voiceless unaspirated and prevoiced stops. This study compares these three laryngeal stop systems and examines the acquisition of the English and German systems by a group of native speakers of Dutch. The analysis reveals that both trained and untrained participants transferred prevoicing from Dutch into English and German but acquired aspiration and thus showed a “mixed” laryngeal system in both their L2 (English) and their L3 (German). Since even untrained participants produced voiceless stops in the target Voice Onset Time range, pronunciation training has only a moderate effect.*

Our study is concerned with reading processes. Using a letter-detection paradigm with masked priming, we tested for the existence and time course of vowel digraph effects in Dutch and English. Whereas Dutch readers showed digraph effects with 67-ms primes, English readers showed only letter effects at 67 ms and merely a weak digraph trend at 83 ms. These findings are consistent with the PSYCHOLOGICAL GRAIN SIZE THEORY, a model of reading development that predicts that grapheme-phoneme conversion proceeds faster in shallow than in deep orthographies. This also demonstrates that similar language structures can be processed differently if they are modulated by different inter-faces, in this case, orthography.

This study compares speech production data of agrammatic aphasic speakers in Dutch, German, and English to examine the relative importance of different properties of determiners and pronouns (such as case, gender, definiteness) in these three languages. Agrammatic aphasic speakers omit determiners and use relatively few pronouns in their speech production. Ruigendijk (2007) compared Dutch and German-speaking agrammatic speakers’ performance and showed that the German group omitted more determiners. The current study adds data from English-speaking agrammatic aphasics to test the hypothesis that the more severe problems in German agrammatism were caused by case morphology, which is not present on Dutch and English determiners. The results show that English patterns with Dutch, and thus support the hypothesis that it is case morphology that makes the German determiners more problematic.

This paper is a corpus-based comparative study of modal particles in German and Dutch. We examine the special ability of Dutch and German modal particles to cluster, and demonstrate that Dutch is far more cluster-friendly than German. We also find clear differences in the behavior of cognate particles in the two languages and note that a corpus study reveals quite different patterns from those arrived at by introspection in earlier research. Finally, we suggest that in attempting to capture regularities about particle usage, it is useful to consider not just the linear ordering of particles within a cluster, but also typical non-contiguous pairings (for example, as “brackets” inside which other particles may occur). We also speculate briefly on the function of particle clusters.