I made Flemish dialect “cheat sheet” to help non-Flemings understand us in informal settings

**TL;DR I’ve made a sheet of the most commonly used variants of many words used in Flanders. It is targeted to people who know good standard Dutch but did not grow up in Flanders to be familiar with the most often used Flemish dialect words (like “Ge moogt”). It is not meant to learn full blown dialects. Just to understand, not even to speak it as you can speak standard Dutch to make yourself understood in Flanders.**

[The Flemish dialect sheet (you can make corrections)](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a_eOQPciOnm_xFmlMjQt85Froi4GA5MwvYCbhr2F1wU/edit)

I got the idea when I was correcting the CV of a collegue of mine who is from an East Asian country. I knew she could speak some Dutch words but she always speaks in English wtih us.

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But on her CV it said:

English (good)

Dutch (good)

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Surprised I went to her and asked (in Standard Dutch) if her Dutch was really as good as her English. Surprisingly it was. I asked her why she never spoke Dutch with us, her answer: “Because you speak too fast and use too many dialect words.” We have heard similar things from other colleagues who learned standard Dutch but never spoke it.

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And it’s true. I’d argue that in Flanders many of us have 3 modes of speaking:

* Standard Dutch in very formal settings (rare though) or when speaking one-to-one with Dutchmen or people from a very different part of Flanders
* Our native dialect with friends and family
* An intermediate form we use when speaking in group at work/school/… A small effort is made to speak a bit cleaner but only just enough that other Flemings can understand us. A lot of word mashing is used which is very hard to understand for people used to cleanly seperated words.

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It’s this last form where people, who might know perfect standard Dutch but are completely unfamiliar with Flemish words, lose us in translation.

Once you really stop to listen attentively you will notice that all of us know quite a bit of words of the adjacent dialects. I do not speak West-Flemish but if I hear “zie(n)der” or “je meugt” or “joak” I know what the words mean. Neither do I speak a Brabantian dialect yet I know what “zulle” means.

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It seems growing up in Flanders we come in contact with different dialects just enough to form this fluid dialect continuum in our minds. One that allows us to map meaning to words that sound just enough the same as other words. Like the “gie(n)der/junder/gulder/gelle/gulle/gullie/jullie” word continuum, knowing more than half of these words allows us to understand the meaning of the other half. Even when hearing them for the first time.

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This will probably be controversial and might have an East-Flemish bias. But I divided the Flemish dialects in:

* Flemish-Dutch
* West-Flemish
* East-Flemish
* Brabantian

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West-Flemish is the least controversial one. It doesn’t really stop at the border though, it bleeds into East-Flanders. Brabantian is the family to which Antwerps and Flemish-Brabant dialects belong (also spoken in Noord-Brabant). This family also doesn’t stop at borders. It bleeds into East-Flanders and the Limburg province. East-Flemish is basically the transition region between these 2 large families and which has characteristic of both but also some unique words.

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I left out Limburgs because:

* Well firstly I personally don’t know a single word of Limburgs besides ich(?) and mich(?), so I would only embarras myself
* Of the 4 dialect families in Flanders it might possibly be the smallest (because the majority of the Limburg area lies outside Flanders/Belgium) in amount of speakers in Belgium
* It seems Limburger can always speak some form of Brabantian or standard Dutch because I’ve never met one I couldn’t understand despite not knowing a single word of Limburgs
* I really wanted to keep it as small as possible

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The Flemish-Dutch column changed names many times because it’s hard to give it a name. I first called it common Flemish but that is quite misleading. If anyone knows a better name please tell me. It contains things that the vast majority of Flemish dialects use. Stuff like “Da’s” and “‘t is” could not be put under any single family. I wanted to avoid repetition, an empty cell means most Flemings will use either the standard Dutch version or more likely the common Flemish-Dutch version.

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I ignored the vowel shifts of city dialects like Gents and Antwerps. Those just vary too much and are too local. I tried to write everything in a way that is consistent with standard Dutch. In the case of West-Flemish though they never say ‘gaan’ or ‘zijn’ so there I did write ‘goan’ and ‘zyn’ with the ‘y’ sometimes pronounced as ‘i’ or ‘ie’. Their vowel shifts are pretty consistent over a larger area.

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**Whatever the case, I will have made a lot of mistakes or miss quite a bit of words. I also left out a lot of words (like wulder) because I don’t think they’re used that often (anymore). Of course that is quite subjective, yet an effort had to be made to limit the amount of words so it doesn’t become too intimidating.**

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I hope with this sheet people can learn just enough of those same words so that they’ll be able to follow informal intermediate Flemish conversations.