Talk:Hasselt dialect

The title and scope of this article

As there is no article for the dialect, why don't we move this one and simply entitle it "Hasselt dialect"? Of course it implies eventual expansion, but that's fine, surely?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:14, 22 February 2022 (UTC) Here are some more articles about the dialect which could be useful: https://www.veldekehasselt.be/artikels/ --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:50, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

@Andrew Lancaster and Nardog: If you want to expand the article in the near(est) future, that's fine. I don't have sources to do that. There are about 500 dialects of Limburgish. We can't have an article for every single one of them, and the expansion of Limburgish should be our priority, IMO.

The Hasselt dialect is rapidly changing anyway. The one described here is a conservative variety that is typically associated with the town. I bet a new dialect is emerging, much like in the case of the Genk dialect, or Multicultural London English. That too should be covered in the article - unless Limburgish is dying out in the town and Tussentaal is what is replacing it. We can cover that as well, though.

As of now, the article is worthless for any other purpose than showing the phonetics and phonology of the dialect. As such, it should be a phonology article and listed together with Maastrichtian dialect phonology, etc. "X phonology" articles (whether named as such or not) should not be hidden from readers. I see no reason to insist on having a "Hasselt dialect" article only because there is a potential to expand it - unless you're willing to actualize it? Because "someone else could do it" isn't good enough, IMO. Sol505000 (talk) 13:00, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

The problem with naming an article "X dialect phonology" when there is no article named "X dialect" isn't that there should be space to cover other aspects of the dialect. It's that there is no article named "X dialect", period. We don't create articles named "X phonology" about languages that don't have their own articles. The existence of the variety needs to be established first. The only scenario where it would be inappropriate to name this article "Hasselt dialect" is if the existence of the dialect per se cannot be confirmed in reliable sources, in which case we might as well name it "Hasselt accent" but it wouldn't be appropriate to name it "Hasselt dialect phonology" either. Nardog (talk) 13:18, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

I don't agree with this. The main article is Limburgish, which can serve the purpose of the "Hasselt dialect" article. Limburgish has neither a standard pronunciation nor a standard grammar, and in that sense is much like Norwegian. The ~500 dialects of Limburgish I was talking about are really dialects and not accents, as far as I know anyway.

This is a phonology article and as such it should not be given the obscure title of "Hasselt dialect". Sol505000 (talk) 13:23, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

That's not really an obscure title? It is clearly a title which could logically include discussion of phonology. So I think the only problem is indeed that it needs expansion, but I think that's not really a long term problem. I live in Hasselt and there are publications about the language which can be used to fill things out. There was even a recent publication of Shakespere's sonnets in Hasselts. And we may see this as a long term aim because of WP:Deadline. [As to whether the language will change or die out I am not sure what the relevance is to this discussion. But FWIW I think that unlike some other parts of Limburg the language is indeed used very little as a main language by younger people. Hasselt being a regional capital many residents come from families all over Limburg, and so most people speak a sort of general Flemish with a varying amount of Limburgish intonation and vocabulary. Concerning novel multicultural dialects like MLE, I am not an expert but I think that there is one relatively widely dispersed regional dialect associated with Genk and the "mijnstreek", which I guess is the same one you mention. You can also hear it in Hasselt, but I don't think it is likely to become a dominant way of speaking here.] --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:36, 27 February 2022 (UTC)