How good are you at Gronings?

Today is International Mother Language Day. Your mother tongue is the language you learn naturally as you grow up. It may be the language of the country where you were born, or it may be a dialect. Dialects are spoken increasingly less in the Netherlands. People speak them less and less with their children. Yet they are important. A dialect can be essential to your identity. You grow up with it and it belongs to where you come from.

In this video, Hedwig Sekeres, PhD student at the Faculty of Arts, talks about the Gronings dialect. What many people do not know about Gronings, for instance, is that it is not a dialect of Dutch but of a different language: Lower Saxon. And did you know that there are significant differences within the Gronings dialect? For instance, the word vier (‘four’) can be pronounced as fajer, fère, fare, or feer.

What is the actual level of knowledge of Gronings within the UG community? We asked students and staff what they know about Gronings. For example, what does the word puutje mean, or how do you say that you don’t care about something in Gronings?