Hamont-Achel dialect
Hamont-Achel dialect (, ) or Hamont-Achel Limburgish is the city dialect and variant of Limburgish spoken in the Belgian city of Hamont-Achel alongside the Dutch language (with which it is not mutually intelligible). Native speakers of the dialect tend to call it either "Haëmets" or "Achels", depending on where they are from (the former city of Hamont or the former village of Achel). Phonology. The following section describes the dialect as it is spoken in Hamont. Vowels. The Hamont-Achel 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: Monophthong-glide combinations. Unlike in the neighboring dialect of Weert, all monophthong-glide combinations are restricted to the syllable coda. Those are mostly preceded by a vowel, and they are and the marginal . There also are two combinations of a vowel followed by , which are and . Diphthongs. Dialect of Hamont-Achel contrasts long and short closing diphthongs. The long ones are on average  70 ms longer than their short equivalents. Centering diphthongs are all long. Prosody. Like most other Limburgish dialects, but unlike some other dialects in this area, the prosody of the Hamont-Achel dialect has a lexical tone distinction, which is traditionally referred to as "stoottoon" ('push tone') or "Accent 1", which generally has a shortening effect on the syllable and "sleeptoon" ('dragging tone') or "Accent 2". As in other articles, the latter is transcribed as a high tone, whereas the former is not marked. The difference between Accent 1 and Accent 2 can signal either lexical differences or grammatical distinctions , such as those between the singular and the plural forms of some nouns. It is phonemic only in stressed syllables, an example of a minimal pair is '(record) sleeve' vs. 'house'. Sample. The sample text is a reading of the first sentence of The North Wind and the Sun, read by a 75-year-old male middle-class speaker. Orthographic version. De noorderweend en de zon, die ware ruzie aon 't make over wie 't sterkste was, toen er ene vent verbîj kwâm met ne werme jas aon.