Hoeveel dialecten werden er gesproken in negentiende-eeuws Amsterdam?

How many dialects were spoken in nineteenth-century Amsterdam? In his Algemeen Nederduitsch en Friesch Dialecticon (1874) Johan Winkler stated, after consultation with Jan ter Gouw, that in 19th-century Amsterdam 19 different dialects could be distinguished. This article investigates whether it is possible to find evidence for this assertion in the surviving language material. For this purpose all language phenomena mentioned in 57 sources up till the mid-twentieth century have been put into a database, with information on the neighbourhood where they were used, and other metadata. The resulting database contains 9000 language phenomena of which around 4000 could be linked to a specific neighbourhood. From this it appeared that the number of 19 dialects mentioned by Winkler and Ter Gouw is an exaggeration: on the basis of the available linguistic information, we can only distinguish 5 of the 19 dialects mentioned by them. Next to these, however, we can distinguish a dialect not mentioned by Winkler and Ter Gouw, that of the higher classes (spoken along the Herengracht and Keizersgracht), and 5 sociolects or technical jargons: the Bargoens of thieves and tramps, the jargons of diamond workers, dock-workers, street musicians and players of bingo. Around 1900 the variation is reduced and the dialects gradually merged into a more or less uniform Amsterdam city dialect, due to mobility of labour.