Wetenschapper en kunstenaar Renée van Bezooijen overleden

Renée van Bezooijen is overleden. Van Bezooijen, geboren in Kortrijk (1952) en wonend in Kubaard, was wetenschapper en kunstenaar. Een van haar wetenschappelijke onderzoeken betrof de uitspraak van de r. Dat onderzoek vond plaats aan de Fryske Akademy. Van Bezooijen was een van de eerste deelnemers van de club kunstenaars die exposeren in de boekenpassage De Rode Loper in Leeuwarden. Ze was ook de eerste gast, in 2000, van het kleine evenement Happen met Liwwadders waar ze bevlogen sprak over haar Friese onderzoek.

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven: Approximant [r] in Friesland? An evaluative study among girls Renée van Bezooijen and Jessica Koppers Abstract In present-day Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands three main categories of pronunciation variants of /r/ can be distinguished. In addition to the older alveolar and uvular realisations, there is now an approximant [r], which only occurs in postvocalic position. This new variant is spreading at a fast rate from the influential western part of the country to the more peripheral areas. Children, especially girls, appear to play a central role in this diffusion process. In Groningen, in the north-east, many local children already speak with an approximant [r]. However, in Friesland, in the north-mid, the approximant seems to be hardly ever or never used by native children, not when speaking Dutch and even less likely when speaking Frisian. Is there a chance that this situation might change in the near future? We will present the results of an evaluative experiment which aimed at assessing how approximant [r] is perceived by girls between 12 and 16 years in Leeuwarden, the capital of Friesland, and Zwaagwesteinde, a nearby village. The results were compared with the reactions of girls in southern Limburg, central Het Gooi and south-eastern Gelderland. We made use of the matched-guise technique, in which listeners evaluated the same Dutch text read by the same female speaker with different combinations of /r/-variants. It appeared that the Frisian girls hold a positive attitude towards postvocalic approximant [r], at least when combined with prevocalic alveolar [r]. They prefer this combination above the typically Frisian alveolar [r] in all positions. It may tentatively be concluded that there are no obstacles for an infiltration of the western [r] in Dutch spoken in Friesland by children.

Taal en Tongval: