I was sharing a glass of wine with Peter, virtually and wanted to offer him a lovely toast in Antwerpen dialect.
My in-house expert gave me this ... Da we ze nog lang meuge meuge.
Fluency in this multi-layered, sometimes evolving, language of cubby holes, tricky turns, linguistic gymnastics and dark dusty corners is clearly still some way off.
Da wah za knockgh lang murgher murgher might be a phonetic attempt ... or it just might be pathetic.
2 comments:
LOL - let's have another glass of wine Di, your phonetic effort to reproduce the local Antwerp Dutch dialect really sounds perfect. You do have an in-house expert ;-)
But don't try this outside Antwerp or in Holland, they might assume you were Russian (rest assured, the same would happen to me, and I'm a native)
Integrated? 1,000 % !
You know, I said from the beginning that I'd rather learn the Antwerp dialect but Gert had warned me it doesn't travel far ... however it is that much more fun.
I remember my first sampling of the diversity of 'Dutch'. I was sitting a farmhouse near Mesen and conversation was flowing around me. I had learnt some Dutch by then and a kiwi friend saw my face as the 'locals' started talking.
He laughed and said 'Don't even try to understand them', and sure enough, it was all but impossible.
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