Other allophones include. They appear in contexts similar to Belgian Standard Dutch.
Voiceless consonants are regressively assimilated. An example of this is the past tense of regular verbs, where voiceless stops and fricatives are voiced before the past tense morpheme.
The Hamont dialect contains 22 monophthong and 13 diphthong phonemes. The amount of monophthongs is higher than that of consonants.
Monophthongs
On average, long vowels are 95 ms longer than short vowels. This is very similar to Belgian Standard Dutch, in which the difference is 105 ms. The quality of the monophthongs is as follows:
are similar to the corresponding cardinal vowels, but none of them are quite as peripheral.
Among the central vowels, only, and are phonetically central, the rest of them is front, similar to the corresponding cardinal vowels. is near-close rather than close and is close-mid. As in Standard Dutch, is phonetically similar to the unstressable and the two differ mainly in rounding. There are conflicting reports regarding the backness of as it is depicted as front on Verhoeven's auditory chart and as central on the formant chart.
is similar to, but it is lower and slightly more central. For some speakers there is additional non-phonemic long, which can appear in words such as noordenwind . This is probably an influence of Belgian Standard Dutch.
The contrast between the long open vowels is a genuine front–central–back contrast. The Hamont dialect thus has four, not five phonemic vowel heights.
is open front.
The short and are somewhat higher and more front than their long counterparts. This is not shown on the vowel chart.
Monophthong-glide combinations
All monophthong-glide combinations are restricted to the syllable coda.
Diphthongs
Dialect of Hamont contrasts long and short closing diphthongs. The long ones are on average 70 ms longer than their short equivalents. Centering diphthongs are all long. s of the Hamont dialect, from
The starting points of are close to the corresponding cardinal vowels.
The starting point of is near-open central.
The ending points of are rather close, more like than.
The ending point of is slightly more open than those of the other closing diphthongs.
The starting points of and are more central than the corresponding cardinal vowels:.
The starting points of are somewhat lower than the corresponding cardinal vowels.
The starting point of is somewhat lower and somewhat more central than the corresponding cardinal vowel.
The starting point of is somewhat higher and somewhat more central than the corresponding cardinal vowel.
Prosody
Like most other Limburgish dialects, but unlike some other dialects in this area, the prosody of the Hamont dialect has a lexical tone distinction, which is traditionally referred to as stoottoon or Accent 1 and sleeptoon or Accent 2. They are transcribed as superscript 1 and superscript 2, respectively. This distinction can signal either lexical differences or grammatical distinctions, such as those between the singular and the plural forms of some nouns. The distinction between Accent 1 and Accent 2 is phonemic only in stressed syllables. In final position, Accent 1 is realised as a steady fall through the rhyme, the Accent 2 is falling-rising ; the first half of the rhyme is falling, whereas the rest is rising. In non-final position, Accent 1's F0 stays high in the first 45% of the rhyme and then falls rapidly towards the end of the rhyme. When the focus of the sentence is on a word with Accent 2, it is realized as a very shallow fall-rise combination. Vowels with Accent 1 are generally shorter than those with Accent 2.
