De verstaanbaarheid van "Standaardnederlandsen" voor vergevorderde NVT-studenten in Centraal-Europa

Increasingly, students of Dutch as a Foreign Language come into contact with other varieties of Dutch than are taught at university. If we want to prepare them for real life language situations that are pluralistic and complex, it is necessary to get a picture of the intelligibility problems that they experience and the causes that underlie them. In this article, our focus is on the intelligibility of standard dialects of Dutch. We also briefly discuss the result of a distinction test, in which students were asked to identify the national variety (Belgian Dutch or Netherlandic Dutch). Following Grondelaers, Van Hout & Van Gent (2016), we distinguish four dialects, namely the virtual ("Neutral Standard Dutch") and the vital standard language ("Teacher Dutch") in both national varieties. By means of an opinion test, the intelligibility of 12 audio fragments was assessed by 42 master students of Dutch in Central Europe. The stimuli representing "Neutral Standard Dutch" received significantly higher scores than the "Teacher Dutch" stimuli, even though the average speech rate was comparable and the lexical difficulty of the former was estimated to be higher. This may indicate that other elements, such as pronunciation and prosodic features, are the main factors in explaining the difference in intelligibility scores. Further research with a larger selection of stimuli, manipulated to minimize the number of variables, is, however, needed to map this out. Nonetheless, the preliminary results of this small experiment suggest that both teachers and students of Dutch as a Foreign Language could benefit from a better, researchbased, description of the "vital" standard dialects of Dutch, which at the moment seems to be lacking.