This article became a live-streamed speech.
White American urban liberals may say they’re not racist because they voted for Barack Obama. However, had Obama spoken a thick ebonic dialect, raciolinguistics predicts that they would not have voted for Obama. Nor would urban liberals ever vote for a White Democratic candidate with a thick Southern accent. It turns out that race and language develop together in humans to cue who’s friend or foe.
The Doll Test and Its Flaws
We all know the infamous “race experiment”, the doll test, that allegedly proved that White kids are racist by age 3. The suggestion was that this is White parents’ fault, as though they had taught their children institutionalized racism. Alas, it ain’t so.
In that doll test, children are shown images of various other children of different races and asked who they would like to play with, or who they like the most. Invariably, White children will choose images of other White children.
The first issue with the experiment—apart from criminalizing toddlers for a crime they didn’t commit—is that black children also prefer other black children to play with. It’s not just White kids. It’s everyone preferring their own.
The second, more fundamental issue with the experiment is that children will modulate their choice if they can hear the other children’s voices.
If American White children discover that another White playmate is speaking Polish rather than American English, they will prefer to play with a black kid who speaks fluent American English.
I.e., the discovery was made that language supersedes race. People of all races prefer hanging out with their own kind, however, all people will also prefer people who can speak their dialect well to people who don’t.
And so, when White Southerners in the US started moving North, they were discriminated against by White Northerners. Southern Whites were called “dumb”, “criminal”, or “untrustworthy”. Northerners would rather employ black people who could speak the Northern tongue. And so, we discover that a lot of race posturing has to do with other in-group cues: language includes body language and to a strong degree also dining and clothing habits.
Do I Sound Like My Race?
This insight has been a revelation to me, and you can read a lot more about it in the 2019 book Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad by Jonathan Rosa. In that book, the author discusses the situation in Latin America, but the insights apply to all over the world.
I was born in the Netherlands to Dutch parents, but in the early days of my life my mother spoke a thick small-town dialect of Dutch, which was in some ways grammatically broken compared to the official “ABN” or “General Polite Dutch”. At one day old, I was moved to Antwerp, Belgium, where my father had found a job. My parents were renting an apartment there.
I went to my first school in Belgium, as a 2-year-old preschooler, where I picked up the local Flemish-Dutch accent and dialect. At age 3, my parents return to the Netherlands. When I returned to kindergarten at age 4, I was considered an outsider due to my still lingering Flemish accent.
Not only didn’t I feel welcome, I wasn’t welcomed. Though initially accepted based on my blond looks, shame was thrusted upon me as soon as I opened my mouth and kids laughed. I was an outsider because of my odd Flemish accent mixed with mom’s broken dialect. But of course, I didn’t know that at the time, and I wouldn’t figure it out until now, at age 45.
Yes, I soon adopted and began speaking the local dialect—Brabantian Dutch, which is, once more, somewhat different from “ABN” or polite standardized Dutch.
By age 5, I had now been exposed to my father’s fairly neutral Dutch accent, my mother’s thick rural dialect, to Flemish Dutch, to Brabantian Dutch (which has its own thick working-class dialect variant), and “ABN”, which I consumed mostly through television and radio. Technically speaking, the ABN or standard Dutch was the Holland dialect of the TV elite.
Naming the ABN dialect a standard, of course, was power-posturing: the financial elite of The Hague and Amsterdam made their dialect the standard. This is all the more interesting since, historically, before the age of European colonialism, Brabant used to be the center of Dutch power. Indeed, our Brabantian Dutch accents was once “the standard”, but gave later way to the dialect of the seafaring merchants of the West, whose accents became very much influenced by the English, the most important trade partner.
Small-Town Dialects
In my home country, with a little exposure to people from across the lands, people can quickly learn to pinpoint where other Dutch people were born. There’s the Zeeuws or Zeeland dialect, there’s the dialect of the province of Limburg and of Brabant (my Brabantian Dutch), the Frisian of Friesland, and the Nether-Saxon of the Eastern provinces, and so on, and so forth.
There’s also the royal Dutch dialect, and the thick political “Hague” dialect spoken by ambassadors and CEOs. And there’s the unique accents of inner-city Amsterdam and Rotterdam as spoken by their urban lower-classes. Still, the urban lower-class dialects hold greater prestige than thick rural dialects.
I haven’t even told you about the many other versions of Dutch dialects spoken by immigrants. A Moroccan immigrant ending up in Friesland, ends up speaking a Moroccan-ish Frisian, but there’s also a Moroccan-ish Rotterdamese. Or a Hungarian-ish Limburgian, and a German-ish Brabantian. And then there are all the thousands of local variations that change from town to town.
Yes, the small country of the Netherlands is an e-nor-mous-ly diverse linguistic hotchpotch, and, in fact, I would argue that most of Germanic (North-West) Europe is like this. The Germanics par excellence are a decentralized race that prefers moving in their small circles of equals, without too much need for supranational governing structures imposed upon them. Of course, the Roman and Slavic territories each have their own linguistic diversities.
The Linguistic Hierarchy, a Caste System
You can imagine how, in a small country of the Netherlands, speaking one dialect among others quickly leads to situations of exclusion and diminishment. As a Brabantian Dutch speaker, in adulthood, I was not going to be treated an equal by the people of Holland, but I could afford myself to look down upon Frisian speakers and thick rural speakers. However, as a lone Brabantian among Frisians, I would find myself excluded again.
There was, and still is, a massive hierarchical ordering based on the dialects we speak in the Netherlands, with the royal accent ranking up top, followed by the “lackey tongues” of the political elite, then the “fortunate rich” TV dialects just below it, and the “Amsterdam rich kids” accents in fourth place. Rural dialects tend to rank bottom.
You have to understand, above all, that many of these dialects are so different from one another, that we would need subtitling to understand each other. This is the reason that the national government began pushing for standardized Dutch in education, so that the people of the provinces had a way of communicating with one another.
Americans may find this difficult to grasp, since your nation started out as being an English-speaking nation. Other speakers were forced to adopt English, although there are still pockets of German and Swedish, and so on, that survive here an there. In most European countries, the standard national language had to be imposed upon the population, such as “High German” or “polite Dutch”.
Indeed, a person born in Amsterdam may not be able to understand the Zeeland, Limburgian, Frisian, or Flemish dialects. And likewise, people from those provinces will, initially, not be able to understand the standard polite Dutch spoken by our TV elite!
Personally, as a native Dutchman, I have been the victim of dialect-based discrimination much more than a polite-speaking African has been based on his race. And yet, media and government consistently pretend that dark people are victims of some institutionalized racism, while non-standard speaking White people are the more frequent victims of institutionalized linguistic discrimination.
Personal Backstory
As an individual, I can (and have) acquired the ability to move between dialects, and I could do a pretty fine impression of a polite Holland-Dutch dialect, or even an Moroccan-Amsterdamese accent thrown in for fun.
In fact, I eventually acquired the ability to speak English really well (by Dutch standards) as a form of revenge, for when I speak English nowadays, my fairly neutral accent sounds a lot better than the thick Dutch-English or (Dinglish) of my compatriots. I speak English better than our Dutch Prime Ministers, CEOs, and ambassadors.
This means a lot to me. English being the language of power, I have outclassed the polite-speaking urbanite Dutchmen who would have otherwise put me down for speaking my Brabantian Dutch dialect.
It matters to me because I am undeniably intelligent and my thoughts deserve to be heard, but speaking Brabantian-Dutch, everything I say would be dismissed as the ramblings of a lesser person. Not so on the international stage. Speaking in English, my thoughts and insights are now quite respected, and sometimes quite influential, as they deserve to be.
As a Dutchman from the province of Brabant, I had to learn to speak English in order to be respected, heard, and understood.
Exposure to Dialects
Exposure to the Dutch dialects works unidirectionally: It is the kids from the provinces who learn to understand, and speak, the Holland polite Dutch variant, but not the other way around. The kids from the big cities (in the West of the Netherlands) never get much exposure to the provincial and rural dialects, such as my Brabantian, and will, therefore, fail to understand us.
This has consequences. The people of the cities, as I’ll call them, controlling most of the nation’s wealth (from sea trade), will dismiss provincial Dutch people as being stupid and incompetent, as less trustworthy. And yes, they will prefer to cohabit and work with dark-skinned, racially alien foreigners who happen to have picked up the correct urban Dutch dialect.
All this has led to the following:
Rural and provincial White dialect speakers are systematically excluded from TV and radio shows.
Their accents and dialects are considered so undesirable that they are barred from political debate participation.
Of the 150 Dutch parliamentarians, you will find almost none who speak a dialect, and most are recruited from the urbanized provinces of the West. There is almost no rural or provincial representation.
Of the top newspaper columnists in the Netherlands, most speak (and write) the standard polite Dutch, and half of them are recruited from Amsterdam alone.
My province of Brabant supplied only 1 national columnist, some of the time. Proportionally by population size, it should have been 14-15% of all columnists.
Most government subsidies are spent on the urban populations of the West of the Netherlands: the spenders and the recipients speak the same dialects, so they “like” each other!
People who speak dialect are more likely to be convicted of a crime and are more likely to be given longer sentences, even more so than dark people speaking the correct standard dialect.
People who speak dialect are less likely to be accepted into universities (at equal ability).
Migrants who ended up speaking the polite Dutch dialect are invited to all of these opportunities, more so than the native White dialect speakers.
People who speak dialect are considered less intelligent and less trustworthy. We are dehumanized as outsiders, as out-group members.
And yet, the combined people of the dialect-speaking provinces pay the majority of the taxes.
What to Do?
So, when White provincial Dutch people started noticing that dark-skinned migrants living in the urban provinces were being given preferential treatment, the provincials responded by voting for right-wing parties. The urbanites responded by calling the provincials “racist”, despite actively discriminating against provincials due to their dialects.
Here lies a difficult but very interesting problem to solve: How can we unite the diversity of dialect-speaking White people against the monolith of urbanites and their polite-speaking slaves?
When we solve this problem, we can overthrow the central state, and usher in a new era.
