Statement: Why I wanted to reseach this topic.

I was born in Maastricht and I lived in the area for about ten years. Living in the South of Limburg means speaking a dialect, or at least it does to most inhabitants. At home, Limburgs was our language – or our dialect – and I learnt to speak General Dutch (ABN) at primary school. I have lived in Tilburg for about 15 years and I am aware that people here speak dialect as well. This Tilburg dialect is completely different from what I am used to. I have lived here for years, but I still cannot speak the Tilburg dialect. I cannot pronounce the sounds the way people do it in here, although I must admit that I haven’t tried really hard. I stick to my Limburg dialect, my General Dutch; my ABN with a soft G and my aim for a C2 level of English in a few years. Me and my dialect; I do not speak it as often as I used to, but it is still a part of me. In the end, my dialect is my mother tongue.

After reading the book ‘Language Myths’, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, I started to wonder how dialects evolve. Many passages in the book refer to dialects and accents and I would like to find out by researching where dialects come from and how they have developed over the years. Since my subject is English, I would like to focus on English dialects instead of Dutch. Nevertheless I believe that my own dialect – nowadays an official sub-language – would be very interesting to research too. It has been influenced by Dutch, German and French and research indicates that Limburgs is the dialect that sounds least like General Dutch. I wonder whether English dialects have been influenced by so many other languages as well.

Please note that Great Britain has many dialects and this concerns Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and all of the islands as well. For this research I focussed on the English dialects and accents.