Meonsen

25 March 1996

Song

Who would have thought that the Amsterdam variety of Dutch had a phonetic peculiarity in common with Arabic? Yet it is so. I'm referring to the "thick n" in words like "betekent", "mensen" (e.g. Adele Bloemendaal did it very clearly in the song the name of which I forgot). I already suspected it to be the same phenomemon as the "thick l" in melk (not mellek, but really melk), which is common in Dutch, and also in English and Portuguese. Yet I didn't manage to apply this to the n, being a non-Amsterdam Dutchman. I always had the idea that it involved some kind of o-colouring, as in the "lepol" pronounciation for "lepel" (spoon), but with an n this didn't seem to work.

That was until I noticed that it needed the same tongue-position as the emphatic s, d, and t in Arabic. Phonetically I think this is velarization or glottalisation. Now if I practice the Arabic emfatic s, and then with the same movement do the n in "mensen", I do get the Amsterdam sound.

From a didactic point of view it is noteworthy, that I find it difficult to apply something that happens in my own language to another sound, whereas it becomes easier when tried via a language foreign to me, and very difficult (I can pronounce Arabic slowly, but do not speak or understand it).

Remarks added on 16 March 2026, so almost 30 years later:

Where I wrote “glottalisation”, it should have been ‘pharyngalisation’. As I remember it, I already know that back then. So it seems to be a simple mistake, rather than a case of evolving understanding. But that isn’t certain.
The song in which Adèle Bloemendaal sang might have been this one: “Het zal je kind maar wezen”, from the 1970 series «’t Schaep met de 5 pooten”. Very clearly the first two times in the word “kind”. No longer after that. Then again very prominently at 2:42 in the word “mens”.
After several attempts where Google Groups insisted it couldn’t find the text, it finally did find my post to Usenet, in the group sci.lang.