Avant-garde Dutch 359garde Dutch has a higher-middle-class background, an environment tradi-
tionally dominated by Standard Dutch, and is between 25 and 40 years of
age. As the variety is spreading, Stroop hears it more and more often among
students and salesgirls of a younger age as well. According to Stroop it is
dif¿ cult to ¿ nd men with an Avant-garde Dutch accent matching the typical,
highly educated Avant-garde Dutch women, especially above age 30. How-
ever, among very young teenagers he thinks that the number of boys speaking
Avant-garde Dutch is increasing rapidly. Stroop regards Avant-garde Dutch as
a sociolect rather than a regiolect, as it seems to be socially conditioned rather
than geographically; its speakers come from all regions of the Netherlands.
1.3 Aims of the study
The ¿ rst aim of this study is to clarify the phonetics of the sound change in so
far as it relates to the pronunciation of the diphthong /͑i/. This sound has been
advanced by Stroop (1998: 25) as the major exponent of the new variety. In
doing this, we will concentrate on possible male-female differences. We will
test the hypothesis that highly educated, progressive female speakers deviate
more from Standard Dutch when realizing /͑i/ than men with comparable
social characteristics, both perceptually and acoustically. The acoustic analy-
sis necessarily involves the issue of cross-gender speaker normalization. To
supplement the analysis of the gender-related production of avant-garde /͑i/
we designed an evaluation study to verify Stroop’s ideas. The study focussed
on linguistically naive people’s perception of Avant-garde Dutch as compared
to Standard Dutch and two other accents of present-day Dutch. We expected
young female listeners to be more positive towards Avant-garde Dutch than
older female listeners and both young and old male listeners, and we expected
this effect to be independent of regional origin.
- Study 1: Perception of Avant-garde /͑͑i/
2.1 Speakers and speech materials
To test the idea that women lead the sound change, we should compare groups
of male and female speakers that are equivalent in all socio-linguistically rel-
evant aspects, such as socio-economic status and age. Preferably, the speakers
should not be aware of the fact that their speech is being recorded for linguistic