https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmkxcnakoio
Salta a 0:35
Descrivi, posso dire che Edward (quello che indossa il blu) sta facendo fatica a parlare effettivamente olandese, sta chiaramente pensando alle parole prima che le dicesse, mentre Alex è molto più liscio. Ma da una prospettiva olandese adeguata, come è proprio il loro accento, è ovvio che immigrano giovani?
How good is the Dutch accent of the VH brothers in this?
byu/inluvwithrain inthenetherlands
di inluvwithrain
11 commenti
Your assessment is correct. The one on the left sounds more like a native. Funnily enough they sound a bit eastern to me.
yes, even the older brother has a certain flair to his speech that I would immediatly attribute to being a non-local speaker. Funnily enough, some words are the other way around, the way edward said ‘plukken’ had a kind of rural flair to it that I can’t describe.
It is obvious that they have a background here but that the immigrated young and didn’t need to speak dutch at all anymore after some time.
You can clearly hear that they haven’t spoken the language in a while. But they definitely have an Amsterdam accent.
The accent is juuuust enough to make you think twice about where they’re from, but they speak well.
Edward is making a lot of grammar mistakes, he speaks Dutch like somebody who immigrated to NL from the US and has Dutch as a second language.
Alex speaks grammatically correct and more smooth like you already point out. By the accent you can tell that he has become Americanized and is not surrounded by his native tongue often.
It’s good, it doesn’t sound like they left many years ago. Edward does struggle a bit more with grammar too, but they both sound very Dutch still.
Compare them to someone like director Paul Verhoeven and the difference is huge.
It is pretty obvious there is some sort of immigration background when you hear them speak. Having said that it’s very easy to understand and Alex is pretty close to not having much of an accent at times in my opinion.
It’s a very strong accent, but not the typical accent you’d expect from someone from the US. Their accent remind me of people who are born and raised in the Dutch Caribbean, but moved to the Netherlands as a adult.
PS: I know they aren’t from the Antillen, it just that their accent have similarities.
Considering they are Dutch but ran away to California because of our racism…
American who’s lived here for 20 years (and speaks Dutch pretty darn well) chiming in:
First off I recognize myself and some of my other Dutch speaking Anglo friends. You can tell that they are searching for Dutch worlds and sometimes giving up and just using the English ones. That’s fine as Dutch people also drop in a lot of English words (more so nowadays), but of course they have perfect English pronunciation, which sounds off. As a side note I’ve also had to learn how to ‘mispronounce’ common English words when speaking Dutch (laptop, update, content, fun, etc). Eddie is making a lot of grammar mistakes but his older brother is doing better.
Secondly it’s a bit confusing because while I can totally hear their American accent they also have a ridiculously thick other accent (Amsterdams? Arnhems? ). Whatever it is it’s super nasal, which an American accent also is, so that quality is turned up to 11. Normally Americans who are fluent and have worked on their accents sound a bit ‘bekakt’ (posh?), which also has some nasal qualities but is different then the Van Halen brothers. So it’s funny to hear a strong American accent that comes across as Amsterdams.
Now my question for native speakers: do you guys use the Americanized pronunciation of Van Halen when talking about the band in Dutch or the correct pronunciation? (I never thought about it till now)
Alex is better than Eddie
But: it’s not that bad
For the ones curious, the guys were both born in Amsterdam and grew up in Nijmegen before they moved to the US. [Here you can see where they were born and grew up!](https://youtu.be/OWeSGJTgNJQ?si=nR-Rhesx3boWHYsE)