Kleverlandish (Dutch: Kleverlands; German: Kleverländisch) is a group of Low Franconian dialects spoken on both sides of the Dutch-German border along the Meuse and Rhine rivers.
[1] Traditionally, its southern extent bordering on the South Low Franconian dialect group (commonly called "Limburgish" in Belgium and the Netherlands) is defined by the Uerdingen line (the ik-ich-isogloss),[1] but many Dutch and German scholars place the boundary further to the north based on wider criteria than the ik-ich-isogloss.
[c] The dialects on the Dutch side were first classified as a distinct group by te Winkel (1898) (as "Saxon-East Franconian") and Van Ginneken (1917) ("Guelderish-Limburgish").
The close affinity between these dialect areas had long been recognized by Dutch and German scholars;[d] but it was the Belgian dialectologist Jan Goossens who first extended the scope of the term "Kleverlandish" to include all varieties on both sides of the border.
[7] In much of the Kleverlandish speech area in both the Netherlands and Germany, speakers are shifting from Kleverlandish to regional colloquial forms of the respective national languages, Dutch and German, with a higher degree of decline of dialect usage in Germany than in the Netherlands.