Sittard dialect

It is also spoken in Koningsbosch and in a small part of Germany (Selfkant), but quickly becoming extinct there.

The Sittard dialect belongs to East Limburgish [nl], which means it has a postalveolar consonant at the onset of words beginning with clusters such as sl and st, in contrast with other variants of Limburgish such as Maastrichtian and in Dutch.

The most important characteristic which distinguishes the dialect of Sittard from adjacent Limburgish dialects is the so-called Sittard diphthongization, i.e. the replacement of the close-mid monophthongs /eː/, /øː/ and /oː/ with the wide diphthongs /ɛj/, /œj/ and /ɔw/ in some words such as neit /ˈnɛjt/ ("not", originally neet /ˈneːt/), zuike /ˈzœjkə/ ("to search", originally zeuke /ˈzøːkə/) and bloud /ˈblɔwt/ ("blood", originally blood /ˈbloːt/).

This phenomenon was first examined thoroughly in the first half of the 1940s by Willy Dols, who showed that this Sittard diphthongization typically occurred in syllables with a push tone.

The push tone is realized as a rising-falling contour in the declarative pattern, whereas the dragging tone varies between rising (when the sentence focus falls on the syllable that is non-final) and a shallow rising-falling contour when the syllable is sentence-final.