Dirk de Bekker launches聽Sprekend Nederland聽app, and the new Dutch national research project, Het Groot Nationaal Onderzoek
What does your accent say about you? And how do you judge others on the way they speak? Are regional accents in the Netherlands disappearing or are they as strong as ever?
On December 2nd, alumnus Dirk de Bekker, together with colleague Sander van Nieuwenhuisen from the Dutch broadcasting organisation NTR launched the Sprekend Nederland project. Sprekend Nederland is a unique collaboration between media and scientific research, developed together with a multidisciplinary team of researchers headed by Rosemary Orr of the UCU Accent Project, and including sociologist and UCU alumna Borja Martinovic. The project is , supported by the Dutch national research organisation NWO.
The project seeks to collect a comprehensive and representative sample of Dutch as spoken in 2015, and to examine the stereotypes that we associate with speakers from different backgrounds.
Dirk and his team designed an app where participants speak in to their smartphones or tablets, and also get to hear samples of speech from other participants. They provide feedback to others on characteristics like trustworthiness, warmth, honesty, and answer questions like "Do you think that this person could be a newsreader?", or "Would you like to live next door to this person?". Speakers also get to see the feedback that others give about them.
The design includes input from researchers from all over the Netherlands, and the data that is collected will be made available to the scientific community worldwide.
The launch was so successful that the servers couldn't handle the initial demand, but the app is up and running now, and thousands of people are already participating. In the coming months, the research team will be working hard to present the first interesting results in a live show on Dutch television in the Spring.
If you'd like to know more, follow the links below, and of course, if you're a Dutch speaker - no matter where you're from or how good you think your Dutch is - download the app and participate! And in the coming weeks, look out for your feedback updates, and new additions to the app, including games like "guess the accent" and "how old is the speaker?"