The Randstad area in the Netherlands: Emergent and fluid identity-locality production through language in use

In the 1930s, Albert Plesman, founder of the Royal Dutch Airlines, hosted a trip over the west of the Netherlands. Dutch is indisputably the most dominant language in Randstad. Like in other areas in the Netherlands, poverty exists in Randstad. This chapter introduces the physical, infrastructural and population characteristics of the area in some detail, which explain the specific language variation situation in this area and the poses the challenges. It provides specific illustration of urban language contact situations – from the cities of Rotterdam, Utrecht and Amsterdam. It demonstrates the daily language use in the big cities within the region, the mechanisms of identity expression through language, and the coming to existence of language variation in neighbourhoods where speakers with different social orientations meet, interact and assert themselves. The historical cities all have strong remnants of historical dialect formation through generations of less mobile speakers residing in the same cities and neighbourhoods.