The Maastricht dialect: learning it, speaking it, passing it on

The Mestreechter Taol is not folklore and not an accent. It is a city language in its own right with an estimated sixty thousand speakers, its own dictionary, its own spelling and its own literature. And with the problem every regional language has: it is passed on less than it used to be.

Where the language is recorded

Maastrichts is better documented than many people realise. The Dictionair vaan de Mestreechter Taol is its dictionary, available online at mestreechtertaol.nl. That site received the Language Industry Award for best language website in 2015.

For those who want to learn to read and write it, there is the course book Liergaank Mestreechs.

Where the language lives

A dictionary does not keep a language alive; people do. In Maastricht that happens above all in community life: at Veldeke Mestreech, which works to preserve the language, and in the brass bands, the choirs and the carnival societies.

That is where a child still hears Maastrichts every day. If that community life disappears, the language goes with it — not at once, but surely.

Why SAB pays attention to this

Traditions cost money: a rehearsal room, a subsidy for a procession, a society keeping its head above water. In a budget that always looks like the easiest thing to cut, because nobody falls ill from it.

SAB wants the council to keep supporting carnival, the brass bands and community life, and to give the Mestreechter Taol its due — on signs and in the classroom as well. Not out of nostalgia, but because it is what makes this city this city.