Social meanings of the north-south divides in the Netherlands and Limburg and their linkage to standard Dutch and dialect varieties

Preston (2011) uses the cover term language regard “for all approaches to the study of nonspecialist belief about and reaction to language use, structure, to diversification, history, and status, and none of the various approaches that have concerned themselves directly with such matters – the ethnography of speaking and language (and various aspects of anthropological linguistics in general), language ideology, the social psychology of language, the sociology of language, and folk linguistics (including perceptual dialectology) – is excluded.” Preston prefers ‘regard’ above attitude “since some folk linguistics beliefs are not necessarily evaluative, and evaluation is taken to be a necessary component of attitude” (2011:10). The aim of this paper is to 1, elaborate on the social meanings of the geographical notions ‘south’ and ‘north’ in the Netherlands; 2. explore how this projection of oppositions, which are salient at a national level, recurs at a smaller scale (Irvine and Gal 2000:37) in the Dutch province of Limburg; and 3. how notions of ‘south and ‘north’ are linked to linguistic facts in the popular mind (Preston 2010:88)