Joost Roger Robbe

From Kortrijk to the Caribbean: the significance of a final -t

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Some linguistic features are striking and unmistakable. Others are so subtle that outsiders barely notice them – while insiders hear them instantly. A t-sound at the end of a word can be one of those features. It may seem insignificant, yet it can signal where you are from, where you belong, even who you are.

In Dutch, final –t is a fragile consonant. In everyday speech, it is often dropped altogether: Dutch speakers say nie instead of niet ‘not’, wa instead of wat ‘what’, and da instead of dat ‘that’. No speaker deletes every final –t, but no one keeps them all either.

This type of deletion is often associated with informality in Standard Dutch. But it … ↪

A curious case of language death: How one man killed off Amager Dutch

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For a Danish translation of this article, click here. Updated Oct. 14.      

As Lingoblog celebrates UN German Language Day, Joost Robbe examines the unique history of Amager Dutch (a Dutch-Low German dialect), used on the Danish island of Amager, near Copenhagen, between the early sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. He explains how, having survived for centuries, the fate of this minority language rested on the choices — and linguistic inadequacies — of a single person.

How often can the death of a language be traced back to a single person? Almost never. But the case of Amager Dutch – once spoken in Store Magleby outside Copenhagen – is different. For centuries, the community combined Dutch speech with a strong Low … ↪